THE HEART MACHINE (2014)

A man begins to suspect that his long-distance girlfriend whom he met on the Internet has been living in the same city as him, and he sets out looking for her.

Cody (John Gallagher Jr.) and Virginia (Kate Lyn Sheil) start talking while he’s in Brooklyn and she’s in Berlin. It’s a romance that could only happen online, and they’re happy together—except they’ve never really met. But Cody’s questions about Virginia’s life in Berlin become an obsession, leading him to doubt that she’s there at all. Combing NYC for clues about her whereabouts, an increasingly driven Cody begins overstepping boundaries of privacy in his desperate quest for answers. Tracking two parallel journeys that show how digital mediation complicates modern love,The Heart Machine explores the evolving relationship between physical and emotional intimacy, isolation in the urban hive, and the seduction of hiding behind a screen.