Every Heavy Thing, the latest feature from prolific indie auteur Mickey Reece which just had its world premiere at Fantasia 2025, is a pulsing technothriller propelled by daring Lynchian experimentations. Essentially, it feels like a standalone Black Mirror episode reckoning with the threat of Big Tech in American suburbs.
Mounted against the listless backdrop of Hightown City, the story follows Joe, portrayed with unsettling precision by Better Call Saul’s Josh Fadem, a modest ad salesman for the state’s only alt-weekly that has yet to fold. Joe’s life is pretty boring, though he seems satisfied with it. He does his job, spends time with his coworkers because there’s nothing else to do, and waits for his longtime girlfriend Lux (Tipper Newton), a nurse at a local hospital, to come home at night. Joe and Lux are chiefly happy, though the latter harbors a secret that’s not so life-altering as what Joe will soon experience.
Joe’s everyday routine takes a sharp turn when his coworker Paul (Chris Freihofer) insists that they see the show of nightclub performer Whitney Bluewill (Barbara Crampton in a sultry portrayal). Joe caves in. After a great night, he runs into the chanteuse outside the jazz club. She’s taking a smoke. “Sensational performance tonight,” he compliments her. But before they can even begin a real conversation, a gunshot is fired out of nowhere. Still in shock, Joe tensely runs to his car, where the perpetrator, tech genius William Shaffer (the sinister James Urbaniak), awaits him. William has been responsible for the series of disappearances in Hightown, local women going missing without a single trace, just as reports on Big Tech’s arrival in the town constantly punctuate the narrative.
As a result, Joe becomes an unwilling accessory to the crime, but the serial killer does not intend to kill him. Instead he lets him go for a tech-aided experiment in which the murderer is able to access his mind and torture him with violent and nightmarish images that begin to warp his sense of reality. It upends his relationship with Lux. It disrupts his job. Paranoid and sleep-deprived, Joe tries to keep the matter at bay by derailing the investigation of his new colleague Cheyenne (newcomer Kaylene Snarsky) into the murders. Along the way, he reconnects with his childhood friend, trans woman Alex (Vera Drew, of indie darling The People’s Joker), who thinks he might be “a magnet for sexually repressed men” and that he’s “almost cool” after telling her the disturbing dreams he’s been having.
Fadem masterfully inhabits the faux identity crisis that his character is suddenly thrust into—a gentle, if uninteresting, man now on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, Urbaniak is perfect as a proxy for every mad tech mogul out there. His portrayal is gnarly and beguiling, a certified incel, one might say. The female characters, though, do not have much active role to play, save perhaps for Snarsky, whose determined Cheyenne figures in an anxious yet thrilling confrontation with our villain. Drew is a welcome presence, but she’s underutilized.
Our protagonist spirals throughout the movie, and Reece’s visual grammar mirrors his paranoia. The picture shifts between digital aesthetic and analog charm, toying with grains, glitches, aspect ratios, and split diopter shots. Every image is bright, textured, and steeped in neon. Reece is happy to stretch an image to disorient the viewer, as though assuming the visual lexicon of a computer. It feels like you’re dreaming, except it’s all in code. Sound designer Nicholas Poss, the director’s longtime collaborator, also heightens the spirit of the film, infusing it with synthesizers that expertly capture what it’s like to consume technology as a hallucinogen. To some extent, the cyber thriller also doubles as a paean to motion pictures of the ‘70s and ‘80s, as immediately declared by its hazy opening scene.
Yet, Every Heavy Thing is a movie that could only come from today’s cultural terrain, given how Big Tech, steered by stupid, narcissistic men, not only hacks into our lives but chronically defines it. (Cambridge Analytica, anyone?) In a highlight scene, the film reveals that William has been working on a microchip technology “designed to provide consumers with the experience of life from another person’s perspective,” engined by the voyeuristic allure of living vicariously through another. The real terror here is that it’s just a matter of time before all of this becomes our tangible reality as we continue edging toward the possibilities of artificial intelligence that de-skills many corners of our lives. I’m not sure if you can reduce it to mere “conspiracy.” At the same time, the movie functions as a critical diatribe on the terrifying implications of state surveillance and how internet culture notoriously fuels misogyny, just as it entertains trans politics and gun control rights. Big Tech, it argues, is a monster that perpetually rears its ugly head.
Every Heavy Thing is delightfully strange and impressionistic. It is sonically and visually hypnotic, an outré experience that constantly distorts itself. It’s a microbudget work, where the story is contained but the vision is not limited. Whether or not you’re into indie genre cinema, this is a cinematic encounter that actually has a lot more personality than what the mainstream fare has to offer as of late. It is also darkly funny. I might be a decade too late to the party, but what an introduction to Reece’s uncompromised artistry. A banger, if you will.
Every Heavy Thing recently played at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the official site for the title.
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