[SXSW ‘23] ‘With Love and a Major Organ’ review: sentimental satire about love and longing

A unique love story.

March 13, 2023

With Love and a Major Organ made its world premiere as part of the “Visions” category of the SXSW film festival this year. The Canadian film takes place in a dystopian universe that is much like our own, but with a few key differences. In this world, people’s hearts are not what we know them as. Instead, they’re various objects like lanterns or flower vases, or sometimes hermit crabs.

The world of With Love and a Major Organ is cold and bleak, and largely automated. We might all be on apps all the time, but here, there are apps like “LifeZapp”, which is designed to truly take any and all decision making out of your own life. LifeZapp has an algorithm that reminds you to do your laundry and how to have conversations with friends. With an app that can do most of your thinking for you, what is there to worry about? It’s this attitude that leads the culture of With Love and a Major Organ to deny their feelings and focus instead on logic.

Anabel, played by Anna Maguire, is a sensitive soul. She doesn’t fit in with the world around her one bit (which is accentuated by the wardrobe choices — while everyone around her is in neutrals and grays, she opts for a bright purple and yellow plaid jacket, and lots of color). By day, she’s a “Virtual Insurance Agent”, but when we first meet her, she’s got paint smeared on her cheek. She’s a painter and a poet, and a truly romantic soul.

Virtual Insurance is exactly what it sounds like — insurance for things like deleted playlists, missing archives, and deleted Facebook histories. It’s not hard to believe that there’d be a market for an insurance product like this, much like there probably is a market for an app like LifeZapp. With Love and a Major Organ is smart and funny in its satirization of our unfeeling and tech-obsessed culture. Anabel is a bit old school even by our real life standards. She wants to date by meeting someone “the normal way”, and isn’t really interested in the apps that could help her find a match. She’s lonely though, and she does want to find someone to be with.

One day on a lunch break in the park, Anabel meets George (Hamza Haq). While he comes across as stiff, uncomfortable and awkward, it seems he may also have a gentle sensitivity to him — he only reads the previous day’s newspaper, that way he knows that everything turned out okay. Anabel hardly knows George at all, but from this brief interaction, she falls head over heels in love.

SXSW ‘23

Rejected by George, Anabel cannot stand the pain she is in any longer, and so she tears her own heart out. She sends her heart to George, and he steals it, putting it into his own chest. This transforms George entirely. He becomes a compassionate soul, the sort of person who becomes a vegetarian because it simply makes him sad to eat a creature who was once alive. Anabel is also transformed by having torn her own heart out. She becomes cold, almost robotic. She is no longer guided by her dreams, but instead entirely by logic. The performance from Anna Maguire is great — she essentially plays two entirely different people in this film.

Anabel and George are now connected by this one heart, and both forever changed by it. As the film carries on, we see the benefits and deficits of both ways of living — soullessly, robotically, or passionately, kindly. George, awakened to compassion and love, is now capable of a sadness he never experienced before, but he’s also capable of warm feelings of love. Anabel is no longer lonely or sad, but she is a miserable person to be around. It’s a dichotomous viewing experience that, at times, seems like an oversimplification of a very obvious metaphor, but it’s no less enjoyable to watch.

With Love and a Major Organ is a unique love story. It’s artistic without seeming overly stylized, and the script is beautifully poetic. With a fairly simple plot, the main characters learn and grow so much in a short amount of time. With Love and a Major Organ is the feature film debut of writer Julia Lederer, and it seems she poured her heart into Anabel. There’s a lot of beautiful prose in With Love and a Major Organ, something that is pretty uncommon in most films, and it doesn’t always work. Not every moment or beautiful line of poetry flows smoothly in the film, and, while beautiful and artistic, it won’t appeal to everyone. With Love and a Major Organ is a film for those who are in touch with their sentimental and romantic sides.