‹ Back

(Fantasia Fest 2025 Review) Watching is not Enough: EVERY HEAVY THING, Digital Guilt, and the Ethics of Fragmented Witnessing. 

By. Professor Horror

                                            

There’s something deeply uncomfortable about being a bystander in EVERY HEAVY THING, Mickey Reece’s ( Agnes, Climate of the Hunter) new analog nightmare (which had its world premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival). Not just for the film’s protagonist Joe, an ad salesman turned unwilling accomplice, but for the viewer, too. In a world overrun by digital static, surveillance-state omniscience, and the paralyzing paradox of “awareness,” Reece asks a deceptively simple question: Is watching ever enough? It’s a question that haunts every frame of EVERY HEAVY THING, and not just because the story centers on a man who sees a murder and does nothing. It’s because the film implicates its audience in that same failure to act. Set in the fictional Hightown City, where tech billionaires and dead-eyed citizens coexist in VHS fuzz, the film mirrors our own complacent stares…those glazed-over looks we give headlines, livestreams, and feeds full of disappearing women, political horrors, and unchecked violence. And like all good horror, Reece doesn’t let us look away.

Joe (Josh Fadem) is a mid-thirties schlub content with his job selling ad space for a failing alt-weekly and spending quiet nights with his nurse girlfriend, Lux (Tipper Newton). His life is unremarkable. That is until one night, after reluctantly accompanying a coworker to a nightclub, he witnesses a murder in a back alley. The killer? Tech mogul William Shaffer (James Urbaniak), who, in a move as audacious as it is terrifying, calmly introduces himself and informs Joe that he’s now part of an “experiment.” If Joe tells anyone what he saw, he dies. From there, EVERY HEAVY THING becomes a glitch-drenched spiral of paranoia, hallucinations, and quiet horror. Joe starts seeing things: fractured dreams, ghostly women, Shaffer’s grinning face. His young coworker Cheyenne (Kaylene Snarsky) starts digging into the missing women case, unknowingly dragging herself into the web Joe is too afraid to disrupt. Meanwhile, his childhood friend Alex (Vera Drew) reenters his life, and a bar conversation about queerness becomes one of the film’s most poignant moments of emotional honesty.

                                                

The mystery is solved early. Reece isn’t interested in whodunits. He’s interested in what now? What does it mean to have knowledge of evil and do nothing? What does it mean to look and look and never move? Visually, Reece weaponizes fragmentation to devastating effect. EVERY HEAVY THING is full of split screens, glitch transitions, surveillance overlays, and VHS fuzz, which creates a visual grammar that refuses coherence. Joe is never allowed a full frame. Instead, he is split, multiplied, mirrored, and watched.  Within this, Reece builds a language of divided identity as one screen shows reality, another shows dream, another shows a screen within the screen. The act of witnessing becomes warped and refracted. And the audience is just as unmoored as Joe, as they are unable to distinguish truth from feed or action from inertia. This fractured aesthetic is more than just a stylistic flourish. It mirrors the psychological burden of passive witnessing in a digital world. Joe isn’t haunted by guilt alone…he’s haunted by the endless, looping replays of the violence he can’t stop. We scroll past tragedy every day, split our attention across infinite tabs and tiles. Like Joe, we watch. And like Joe, we do nothing. By splintering his visuals and denying narrative closure, Reece turns surveillance into surrealist horror. The more Joe watches, the less he sees. The more he knows, the less he understands.

                                                                          

As for the director, Mickey Reece has long resisted comparison. Critics often reach for Lynch or De Palma when trying to capture the off-kilter rhythms and genre-bending structures of his films. But with EVERY HEAVY THING, Reece veers closer to the emotional chaos and existential dread of Andrzej Żuławski, the Polish auteur whose films like Possession and On the Silver Globe revel in psychological fragmentation, bodily breakdowns, and mystic techno-visions. Like Żuławski, Reece leans into emotional intensity rather than exposition. EVERY HEAVY THING often forgoes traditional cause-and-effect logic in favor of visceral affect, which is a strategy that mirrors the helplessness of its protagonist. Joe is swept along not by plot but by mood, tone, and vibration. His descent into madness isn’t dramatic, instead it’s quiet, incremental, and deeply familiar to anyone who’s ever doomscrolled through despair.  And like Żuławski, Reece refuses neat resolutions. The film’s final confrontation between Joe and Shaffer echoes the earlier, gentler conversation between Joe and Alex…a conversation that suggests love, empathy, and human connection might offer escape from the experiment. But Reece doesn’t resolve this. He leaves it open and challenges the audience to do what Joe could not: make a choice.

And through all this heavy material, we must take a moment to honor Barbara Crampton. Playing nightclub singer Whitney Bluewill, Crampton is only on screen briefly, but oh, what an entrance. Lit like a goddess, framed like a 1940s icon, she commands the stage with sultry charisma and aching gravitas. It’s a performance within a performance: a woman singing in the dark, drawing Joe in, and us too. Her role might be small, but it’s unforgettable, the kind of casting that shows Reece’s deep love of horror history. He doesn’t just put her in the film. He reveres her. Crampton brings a kind of generous nostalgia, a knowing wink to genre fans, but also a reminder of the weight that women carry in horror. Her fate…violent, quick, and cruel…underlines the stakes for every woman in Hightown. And yet her presence lingers, like a haunting melody.

                                                 

EVERY HEAVY THING isn’t just a technothriller. It’s a film about how seeing without acting is its own form of violence. Through glitchy aesthetics and philosophical dread, Reece confronts us with the burden of being witnesses in a world where atrocities stream 24/7. It’s not the killer that haunts Joe…it’s his own inaction. In a time when so much horror is about spectacle, Mickey Reece reminds us that the scariest thing is doing nothing. Because sometimes, every heavy thing is what we choose not to carry.