The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things tells the story of a small boy passed around from person to person, but always haunted by his mother. There were a lot of aspects of this movie that resonated deeply with me because I had a similar upbringing, but strange visuals ruin any brilliance the movie may have reached.

After being in a loving foster home for several years, Jeremiah (Jimmy Bennett, Dylan Sprouse, Cole Sprouse) is returned to the care of his narcissistic drug addicted mother. When he tries to return home, his mother, Sarah (Asia Argento), convinces him his foster parents don’t want him anymore. She also leads him to believe that if he were to return to his foster home, he’d end up dead. She leads him on an escapade through several moves, several boyfriends, a few husbands, and endless abuse. She even goes as far as introducing him to drugs at a very young age. Jeremiah loses himself through time and begins to fall into his mother’s insanity.

My biggest complaint is the director/writer, Asia Argento, creates such a great gritty movie with such realistic elements of emotional malnourishment and physical abuse but dashes them away when there is a visual effect using red crows that shattered my complete submission to the story.

Argento splashed the screen with honest depictions of what happens to abused children. When they moved using black garbage bags I broke down in tears because most of the dozens of movies I’ve had to make were made using the illustrious black garbage bag.

Then out of nowhere, a crappy red crow. The crows look like they were physically painted with acrylic paint, photographed, pasted in a flip book and filmed. After they were filmed they were placed in a scene in the most bizarre way possible. It felt like Argento slammed on the breaks while driving 100 miles per hour for no reason in rush hour; it causes a pileup.

Most of the acting in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is phenomenal. All of the actors do a great job of showing true packaging in which evil comes. Most of the actors know when to pull the character back from obviously monstrous and make the character so insidiously subtle they would be hard to spot by normal people in the real world.

I admit; I was too let down by the visuals and some herky- jerky camera work to enjoy The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. I will recommend it as an explanation as to why being bounced from place to place, from home to home is damaging to a child and how a child can become very good at survival techniques.