Written and directed by Fernando Trueba, Haunted Heart is a romantic thriller that isn’t particularly romantic or thrilling. It does offer a few things to love, including a raw performance from Aida Folch and a gorgeous setting in the Greek Isles. But the characters aren’t well-developed and it takes far too long for any real action to happen. When the plot finally does get interesting, there’s so little revealed that it’s hard to care.
The story opens with Alex (Aida Folch), a Spanish woman, arriving on a remote Greek island for a job at Max’s (Matt Dillon) restaurant. Unfortunately, her arrival is nearly a week behind schedule. Max has given her hostess job to someone else. After some negotiation, Max agrees to let Alex take a different role at the restaurant, as a server. He only asks that she give two weeks notice before she leaves.
These opening scenes establish Max as a sage, calm, kind, and dependable and Alex as a bit of a helpless mess. And then things abruptly change. Alex makes friends, is great at her job, and turns into a bit of a sex kitten, hellbent on getting Max into bed. She’s confident and open with him. He’s awkward and closed off. Alex’s change is jarring. I kept waiting for the naive, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed girl to come back but she never did.
Matt Dillon’s performance as Max is erratic. There are moments where he captures the essence of the silent, tortured man so well. And other moments where his delivery is so cheesy I chuckled. Folch plays Alex as unsophisticated, then sexy, and then afraid, as the script calls for, but each version of the character seems disjointed from the rest.
We spend the first hour of the film letting Alex and Max meet and get acquainted as a couple, an hour feels slow and empty. Alex gets settled on the island then relentlessly seduces her boss, who puts up a fight before surrendering. There’s not much to connect them other than the fact that they’re two attractive people on a remote island together. It’s not perfect, but they seem content.
Then something shifts. Alex discovers a concerning photo from Max’s past, which leads to more questions and more clues to his life before the island. When Alex confronts Max, he lies or tells her he needs more time. And somehow, in the span of thirty minutes the story goes from a happy couple living an idyllic island life to a murder spree. And what bothers me the most is that we never learn exactly why.
Alex has been lied to by a lover in the past and she says she won’t let it happen again. But she does. Max is dropping red flags in every direction, yet she stays. Why? We never understand. We never even see her struggle with the decision. It’s all a missed opportunity to give us more of Alex’s depth.
With Max, we learn various random facts about him that never really add up to anything. He used to be a musician. He used to have a partner and a child. There’s something about “Malibu Canyon.” What it is, we’ll never know. We’ll speculate and infer, but we’ll never know “why” and we’ll never really even know “what.” There’s no story here, just hints of a story. We don’t know enough about Alex or Max’s past or present to make any meaningful inferences about their characters.
In the entire third act, both characters are acting volatile, but we also don’t know them well enough to make that judgment. By the time we get to the final scene, everything just feels random. Why did Max ask for two weeks notice? It felt like foreshadowing when the question was asked, but it comes to nothing. A generous interpretation would call it a red herring but realistically, I think it’s just a weak metaphor.
But the worst offense of all with this movie is that it’s not scary enough to be a thriller, romantic or otherwise. There is murder. There are chase scenes. There is mistrust. But I never felt scared. There is a literal manhunt between two people alone on an island. That’s scary! But the movie didn’t deliver that feeling.
I do believe Haunted Heart has unrealized potential. It’s beautiful to look at and fun to speculate about the details of the characters’ previous lives. Ultimately, it fails to master the art of leaving things unsaid and doesn’t deliver on the romance or thrills it promises.
Haunted Heart is now in theaters.
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