Reviews
‘Every Heavy Thing’ Is A Manic Murder Mystery Masterpiece [BHFF Review]
Mickey Reece creates a one-of-a-kind dream-like descent into danger, death, and delirium that’s as unbelievable as it is unpredictable.
“Every heavy thing falls away.”
It’s become such a rarity for a movie to genuinely, truly surprise its audience. Cinemagoers can sometimes cynically feel as if they’ve seen everything, only for a film like Mickey Reece’s Every Heavy Thing to prove quite the contrary. You have no idea where this movie is going, and it’s glorious.
Every Heavy Thing is the type of film that picks up a hammer, prepares to swing it, but then kicks you instead. It’s always smart to expect the unexpected in a film by Mickey Reece (Agnes, Climate of the Hunter, Country Gold), but Every Heavy Thing is really something special that plays by its own rules and resists conventional categorization. A sweeping crime saga unspools, yet this story is full of such jarring, abrupt turns that radically throw Every Heavy Thing off balance and threaten to topple this spectacle, only for it to build greater momentum. Every Heavy Thing is a hardboiled murder mystery. It’s a slacker hangout comedy. It’s Dadaist filmmaking that’s a sweeping indictment against gentrification. And it’s so much more.
It cannot be stressed enough that Every Heavy Thing is akin to entering an absurdist parallel universe that’s familiar but just distorted enough to feel surreal. Reece expertly crafts such a lived-in universe that’s infinitely odd, but incredibly natural. Every Heavy Thing is like Thomas Pynchon by way of Tim & Eric or Max Headroom doing Brian De Palma. It shouldn’t work, and yet it commits to the bit and never lacks conviction in its lunacy.
Joe (Josh Fadem), an ordinary, listless ad salesman for a local periodical, witnesses a murder and reluctantly gets pulled into this criminal conspiracy. The darkness that Joe has witnessed slowly infects his life. Every Heavy Thing oscillates between extremes, while Joe gets eaten up as he struggles to reconcile all this. A bad situation becomes worse when this murder points to an even bigger epidemic that’s been plaguing the community. Joe’s ratcheting paranoia is played against his comfortable relationship with Lux (Tipper Newton). What was once a source of safety and stability for Joe becomes another cause for concern. Fadem excels in this role, but his chemistry with Newton is just so natural. They’re a delight to watch, even when nothing is happening with them. There’s a blasé brilliance to the slice of life simplicity that Joe and Lux represent.
Alternatively, William Shaffer (James Urbaniak) threatens to dismantle this happiness and tear through Joe’s life. Urbaniak is terrifying as this sadistic, murderous mastermind who is coded like the type of hyperbolized villains that populate David Lynch films. The entire cast is so electric and locked in. Every character is such a perfect little freak. Every Heavy Thing is tense and taut, but it’s also so effortlessly funny. It will have you laughing out loud between the moments of abject terror.
So much of Every Heavy Thing’s personality comes from the film’s retro vibes that feel lost in time. Nicholas Poss’ fantastic synth score beautifully amplifies the film’s unique world. A chaotic editing style stitches this saga together like a VHS that’s started to melt while it’s transferring its video. Striking lo-fi transitions and dream sequences that are truly original and unlike anything else you’ll see all year. Every Heavy Thing is unquestionably one of 2025’s most unique films. It’s so distinctly Reece’s unique vision and such a burst of passion that would be impossible to replicate. So many memorable sequences are bewildering descents into analog glitches and “datamosh” mayhem that makes it feel like your brain has been hacked and is malfunctioning. It’s an endlessly powerful effect. Reece showcases more of his range during a fantastic Alfred Hitchcock/De Palma pastiche where Every Heavy Thing’s b-movie bliss blossoms into immaculately-staged giallo madness.
Mickey Reece’s Every Heavy Thing is such a weird, mysterious journey that demands to be seen and culminates in an incomparable experience. There’s substance beneath all this blinding ambition, style, and creativity. It’s easy to get caught up in the labyrinthine mystery that doesn’t just consume Joe but hardens him into the best version of himself when everything is said and done. Every Heavy Thing is a celebration of film’s versatility and the power of this medium. It’s an exciting stepping-stone in the career of one of the most exciting modern genre filmmakers.
Every Heavy Thing screened at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival; release info TBD.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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