I was drawn to the movie poster for Buster’s Mal heart and of course the title. It gave off Edgar Allan Poe’s vibes. It’s orangey, a clock sitting atop the man as we focus on his eyes. I think it’s a genius poster and so I decided to give this a watch.
Rami Malek, plays the role of an overworked concierge named Jonah who’s saving up money to be able to buy land so his wife and daughter can move out from his in-laws home. His in-laws are not very nice people. He works night shifts mostly which means he misses out on seeing his daughter when she’s awake and so falls into this depressing hamster race cycle that people generally fall into when they’re living from paycheck to paycheck.
One night, on his shift at the hotel, an eccentric man named Brown walks in to check into a room. He has no ID and no credit cards because of the ‘system’ and because it’s a way to remain enslaved by the government. Of course, he’s not given a room by Jonah but they have their first conspiracy theorist conversation where sleep deprived Jonah is being told about ‘the inversion’ and how Mister-no-ID-on-me was the prophet who was going to need to warn people before it was too late to escape it in Y2K. Our guy does coke too.
The movie repeatedly shifts from Jonah and Brown to a guy named Buster. He’s a wild man who’s successfully been hiding from the authorities. According to the news, he breaks into vacation homes during the cold months and we see him shit in a pot in one. Apart from this, he’s non-violent. He speaks Spanish, just like Jonah and on a closer look, he looks like Jonah, just with a tan and longer hair. He also is an angrier version of Jonah as he calls in repeatedly to radio stations to rant about ‘the inversion’.
The turning point in the repeated shifts occurs when Jonah’s wife and kid get murdered in the hotel room of the hotel he works in. This happens after Jonah lets in our guy with no ID into a room in one act of kindness(he was homeless) after they’d fallen out previously. The cameras registered no one else but Jonah on that night and with the splits we see on screen in Jonah’s personalities which seem like a merge of all three people, the task becomes interesting as we’re forced to probe into the meanings of the different symbols in order to find out who really killed Jonah’s wife and kid. Is Jonah also Buster and Brown or just Buster? Is Jonah dreaming or did all this happen in real life? Did his daughter drown earlier or was she killed that night at the hotel like it says?
This movie has the most interesting theories I’ve seen about a movie in a while and it was exciting to read most of them.