Buster’s Mal Heart

Sometimes a movie is strange solely for the sake of strangeness. It’s hard to exclude Buster’s Mal Heart from such company, but it seems to have a better heart than that comparison (and the title) would imply. The danger with films delving too deeply into mindf—k territory is that, in the process of sacrificing rationality for inventiveness, often the core tenants of narrative and character development are given short shrift. Buster sidesteps this pitfall — but only just — rendering a heartbreaking character study that doesn’t always make a hell a lot of sense but still manages to engage and entertain.

Plot synopsis would fail to do Buster justice, but the plot’s not really the point here. The eponymous “Buster,” played with exceptional range and nuance by Rami Malek, is depicted in three essential modes as the film jumps through its tenuous chronology. He’s alternately a bearded squatter breaking into wealthy people’s mountain vacation homes, a doting father and husband trapped in a soul-crushing job as the night concierge at a cheap hotel, and a castaway adrift at sea in small lifeboat — identities that may or may not coexist in the same timeline. The film’s modus operandi is to cast each of these realities into doubt, and anyone looking for closure or catharsis on that count will most likely come away frustrated.

But Buster is not so much a film geared toward drawing conclusions as to posing questions, and in that regard, it’s a resounding success. It plays a bit like Fight Club meets Donnie Darko, but with a Gilliamesque grasp of the fundamental comedy underlying existential crises. What works about the film is not only its psychological complexity or its deep undercurrent of black humor but its level of emotional engagement with the core relationships that drive the story’s protagonist. As Malek’s Jonah (“Buster” is a sobriquet applied to him by talk radio hosts who frequently field his increasingly unhinged invective) struggles to build on off-grid life for his family, the raving lunatic he will become seems an almost rational outgrowth of a man so desperate to provide a dignified existence for his wife and young daughter that he would sacrifice anything — up to and including his own sanity.

To a large extent, Buster succeeds on the back of stellar turn from Malek in his first feature lead. Writer/director Sarah Adina Smith has created a remarkably demanding film in terms of the emotional register required of its star, and Malek’s talents are more than equal to the task. In her sophomore effort as a feature director, she’s also crafted a film that is almost as demanding of its audience and one distinctly unlikely to court mass-market appeal. That said, anyone with appropriate mindset will find Buster to be an intriguing and challenging film that will defy easy explanations. If any sort of moral or mission statement can be found in the film, it most likely lies in Buster’s Y2K-driven conspiratorial rants about a “Great Inversion” lying in wait to upend society — it would seem that Smith is striving to attain a similar inversion of cinematic expectations, and I for one wish her continued success. Unrated. Now Playing at Grail Moviehouse.