Comments on: Someone Please Explain the Movie Buster’s Mal Heart

By: Bono

Bono — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 17:01:32 +0000

I liked “Donnie Darko” but mostly hated “Buster’s Mal Heart.” Why? They pose similar puzzles and games of hidden clues to the viewer. I realize now that the key difference for me is that “Donnie Darko” had a more clearly heroic ending. Donnie lived and died as a hero. He saved others. By contrast, the Rami Malek character (or characters?) in “Buster’s Mal Heart” was a murderer (he killed his precious little daughter, apparently by drowning!) and kidnapper and he was not at all a hero. “Donnie Darko” is a fundamentally optimistic, uplifting story, whereas “Buster’s Mal Heart” is largely a nihilistic and sadistic story, like an episode of the TV show “Black Mirror,” or like the movie “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.”

By: Bono

Bono — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 06:29:06 +0000

Such a film is a game the filmmakers are playing with the audience. I don’t want to play. I love watching Rami Malek act. But silly gameplaying, pointless puzzles, and trivial pursuit don’t interest me.

By: Starratt

Starratt — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 20:19:31 +0000

So while bouncing around theories it is important to remember this is definitely an “unreliable narrator” film. Meaning, Buster/Jonas likely struggles to actually know what is real/not real and as we try to sort this out as an audience we can never trust what we are being shown.

I find coming back and reading comments on this film interesting because you can tell it really messes the audience up that he may have (probably?) killed his family. He’s likeable. We don’t want that to be the case. We’ll embrace a mor “far out” reality that preserves his family so that we don’t have to reconcile the duality of the main character being this tender person and also something unthinkable.

By: Josi Bech

Josi Bech — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 16:43:07 +0000

It’s possible he did not kill his family. There are all these scenes of his daughter in water, in the pool, in the bathtub with a toy frog. All the water references foreshadow and point to the daughter drowning in the hotel room bathtub and then the mother kills herself presumably by slashing her wrists. Jonas works at a hotel and lets a drifter get a hotel room for free. Jonas remains at the hotel front desk after working a night shift when the morning shift worker relives him. He returns to a room in the same hotel where his wife and child had stayed the night. The tub was still full when he entered the hotel room after getting off of his work shift, which is odd. He empties the tub and then discovers his wife and child in the bed all bloody. He suspects the drifter and rushs to the the room the drifter had been staying in only to find it empty. The police then interview him about this drifter. The police officer can’t find the drifter on the security feed, so obviously the drifter/last free man is a figment of Jonas’s imagination. However, if Jonas had killed his family why did the police not see him return to the front desk with blood on his uniform on the security feed? It seems more likely that he did not kill them. If he had killed them there would have been footage of him returning to the room to do it and he would have been arrested not just questioned. The mental break he experiences later is due to feelings of guilt for not being there to stop his daughter’s drowning and wife’s suicide.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 05:46:56 +0000

I might be way off, but to me it seems like YOU got it totally wrong..
I believe the film leads us to think that each time we see snippets of the life with Marty that we are seeing memories of the Jonas/Buster 10 days before death. It is my opinion, after reading your analysis to help sort my thoughts, that those are not memories but flashes to the other timeline. Something happened on the ship and he’s been lost at see ever since. There is literal split when 1 Jonas becomes 2, and it is not clear that this happens “after” the funeral. What the movie illustrates from the beginning is that sequence in the film does not follow sequence of events.
So what we know is there is a split, and then it stands to reason that we see two life paths, each with their own burden; one in which he seeks out his dream of being a wild man, and one in which he gets a family. In each case he loses his mind, and ultimately comes back.
Going deeper, it seems that each may have been a sort of fantasy, or mental experiment in the “boat of his mind.” When he gets “killed” in the cave, he disappears. The film does not appear to be supernatural. The supernatural elements are put to rest by the fact that the film takes place where the nutcase guy is making crazy predictions about Y2K, so we know that’s our clue that it was all crap, or in Jonas’ universe it was the vehicle by which he could understand that side of his desire/self. (sidetracking here..)
So it almost looks like its just a matter of when each version of him lose and find God. Aha! there it is! ‘Jonas runs from God’ right?
So the rugged man Jonas (Buster) loses God after the mysterious ship incident, and does not get back to God until he is in that home, reminded by his mother on TV, and cuts his hair. The family man Jonas finds god shortly after, gets married, has baby, kills family, drives away (back on the boat is all we know for sure after that, since both paths are present and ultimately fight).
I still haven’t figured out the fight scene, as that would be the connection between the two versions of himself, and explain the ending / reunion with his family.

By: Herro Herrrrro

Herro Herrrrro — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 04:19:12 +0000

What if there were 2 Busters?

Jonas is his singular self at the start of the film.

He is sane, in love, living the dream with his lovely wife and darling daughter.
But, there is a duality (ego and id, good and evil, freedom vs sense of duty, whatever have you).
This duality occurs in the darkest hours of the night, the times in which he is conflicted, tired, and possibly truly open to himself and his inner voices (the prophet, the thief, the mysterious free man).

Jonas slowly realizes that given what is reality (the policeman’s explanation of what was seen on the tape), his self ACTUALLY diverges and splits into 2, both hypothetical and literal, imaginary-self but also real-self possibilities.
And the movie a compilation of flashbacks back and forth between the 2 Busters born from the singular Jonas.

The one Buster in which he accepts that HE IS the prophet who killed his family to “save” them. And who ventures into the world as a homeless madman screaming his truth to show/radio hosts and public, all the while searching for the wormhole and salvation.
OR
He is the Buster who denies he is the prophet, is truly innocent and can’t account for what was not seen on the tapes; who then realizes he could be blamed and wrongly convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. And thus, flees to the coast of another country and onto a fishing boat destined for the sea… only to be lost at sea…
possibly to be spat back onto the shore as Jonas, to try again…

So the bottle and note are real; his mother is real. Just as real as the Buster in the cabin of the poor elderly couple; the Buster who is on the elliptical watching the note wash ashore and his mother cry on tv.
The tv is the small window which connects these two possible realities of Jonas. The corpus callosum of his 2 developed identities: his ego and id, his good and evil, the prophet and destitue husband, etc.
They Finally See each other.
And the psychic helps connect them by vaugely answering questions that make these two different Buster’s seem both plausible and ridiculous: real and fantasy.

The two Busters only truly meet once they have both died.

Cabin Buster, who carries a picture of his wife and child close to his heart knowing they are saved, and who dies in a blaze of divine glory.
And Lost at Sea Buster on the boat in the calm still sea, who is screaming for death, and eats/destroys the image of his family (frogs) because in a sense he is already dead from the pain and loss; his bloodied beard and frog carnage possibly a reflection of what he experienced, or maybe a forboding what is to come?? If this IS a cyclical hell.

When the two meet, clean Buster is the cabin Buster, and the beard Buster is the innocent Buster who is lost in his vast sea-like soul without explanation.
And the two fight.
Which is real?
Which Buster was meant TO BE by God, and all his efficiency?
Is he indeed trapped in a loop and power that is above him?
Or is he given a vision and second chance, to do what he was meant to do?
(As Jonah was meant to go to Nineveh, even if it was against his will and in the belly of a whale.)

Who is the Jonas that washes ashore: The Cabin Prophet Heretical Buster who chooses his own path and death?
Or the Lost at Sea Buster who is caught in the endless cycles of the system that constantly pulls him in to work, only to spit him out at any point or convenience (as in the instance if he were wrongly accused of his family’s murder)?

I think the ending was left as a blurred and vague vision, as an open-to-the-viewer interpretation.
Or at least my mind wants it to be… :P
Kinda, – “Just accept that you will NEVER know what was meant to be until it happens. And you will be in constant conflict with yourself all along the way, no matter which way you go, or what you become” – kinda bs…
:|

By: Mark Young

Mark Young — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:57:20 +0000

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL LIFE. All fantasy nothing happened. Jonah is day dreaming on a day off at the beach. And frogs can’t live in salt water.

By: Terr

Terr — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 05:46:13 +0000

Interesting how many folks tried to “make sense” of this movie. The movie is a very real depiction of mental illness as interpreted by and for the “sane”.
Early in the movie it lightly touches on subjects of ‘what is meant by sanity’; ‘Is the machine of current life really a sane existence?’ , and such. This helps as a counterpoint to the chemical, biological insanity that infects poor Jonas. Buster is his insanity; Illogical, yet somehow making sense in its defiance and rage against all of reality that just doesn’t seem to fit anymore.
For those of you trying to draw a map:
Yes, Jonas killed his wife and daughter.
We watched as Jonas slowly lost all sense of what we call “reality”, but all that takes a back seat to the true beauty of this film. The true message lies deeper than the plot details. It plays with the concepts of reality vs. perception; insanity vs. rigid conformity; universal truths vs. ethics.
Loved this film.

By: AnWe

AnWe — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 21:15:05 +0000

Can’t say I have any explanations, but here are some things that seems to have been overlooked:
If the conversations with the cleaning lady were real, the “lost at sea” part must have happened after the staycation, since Jonah was at least in semi-regular contact with his mother before that point. Unless he lived under an assumed identity after being lost at sea (in which case choosing the name Jonah would be stupidly close to Jonas).

Why did he fire the gun upwards at the cave? To provide a smokescreen (rock dust) for an escape? Hardly, the cops would have caught him in no time. I think there was the sound of an aircraft overhead (IIRC), but firing at that would just be stupid. Suicide to escape the inversion maybe, but why no body, and why are the cops present after the inversion if it was real?

It’s the end at the cave/beach that gets to me, in my interpretation it means the inversion was real and he managed to escape it, but that also means maybe he wasn’t crazy after all (but still, how are the cops still around‽). Then it’s just a deus ex machina ending which is quite dissapointing. It just doesn’t add up in the end…