THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS
D: Asia Argento (2024) ¢ ¢ ¢
Asia Argento, Jimmy Bennett, Dylan Sprouse,
Cole Sprouse, Jeremy Renner, Peter Fonda,
Lydia Lunch, Ben Foster, Marilyn Manson
A young boy has his life uprooted when he's whisked away from the foster parents he loves and deposited with his mother, whose parenting skills, let's just say, are not the best. It's an escalating chronicle of abuse. Every time you think the kid's life can't get any more fucked up, guess what, it does. It's borderline comical. At the time the movie was shot, the book it's based on was thought to be nonfiction, a publishing ploy that turned out to be a hoax. Argento's effectively scary as the mother, a woman who arguably ought to be put away somewhere, but at the very least kept away from raising children. A depressing, back-alley, truck-stop, dive-bar vision of American life, with a painfully real performance by Jimmy Bennett as the troubled but resilient kid.
