Buster’s Mal Heart follows Jonah, a tired hotel night worker who lives with his wife Marty and their young daughter in the late 1990s. After he meets a strange drifter who talks about a coming “Inversion,” Jonah begins to lose his grip on daily life. The film moves between Jonah, a bearded man hiding in Montana homes, and a man lost at sea, while police search for the fugitive. The tone is dark, odd, funny, and dreamlike, with mystery and spiritual questions replacing clear answers.
The film presents Jonah as a Latino man in a mostly white setting and uses both English and Spanish in his scenes. His background adds to his sense of being alone, but it does not drive a broad political message. The main story follows family love, grief, sleep loss, freedom, fate, and a man’s angry search for God or the laws of nature. The story treats the coming disaster as a strange personal and spiritual crisis rather than a debate about modern identity politics.
Community feedback
Was our 46% Woke rating accurate?
Loading review details…
Breakdown
These are the editorial factors and ratings behind our score for Buster's Mal Heart.
Woke representation / casting
The film gives Jonah a Latino background and makes him the main character in a mostly white Montana setting. The movie uses Spanish dialogue and makes that identity visible in his family life and at sea. The director described the choice as showing a brown man in a very white world. The film has no broad group of identity-focused lead characters, so this remains a single strong casting signal.
38%
Woke political dialogue
The film includes a long rant that rent, work, and ordinary life turn people into slaves to a system. The drifter also talks about corporate people, first-class passengers, and underclasses. These lines give the dialogue a brief anti-capitalist and anti-establishment edge. The movie treats the ideas as part of conspiracy talk and mental collapse, not as a clear activist program.
22%
Identity-driven story themes
Jonah’s Latino identity appears through Spanish speech and his place in a mostly white community. The story uses that difference to deepen his loneliness and sense of being trapped. Jonah’s central struggle still follows grief, family love, sleep loss, freedom, and a fight with God or fate. The film does not turn his background into a wider race-based political campaign.
24%
Western institutional / cultural critique
Jonah feels trapped by rent, night work, family duties, and the rules of normal life. The drifter talks about corporate power, first-class people, and the underclasses being left behind. The story repeats the idea that the system keeps ordinary people in a cycle. The film frames these ideas through conspiracy and personal collapse, so it does not become a full activist attack on Western culture.
29%
Woke character or canon changes
The film is a loose modern retelling of Jonah and the whale. The source figure becomes Jonás, a Latino hotel worker in late-1990s America instead of a man in the Bible’s ancient setting. That is a visible ethnic and setting rewrite of an established religious character. The movie changes the story so much that this is a moderate reinterpretation, not a large franchise canon change.
32%
Anti-woke backlash and complaints
Not present. The available X, news, Reddit, and review discussion focuses on the film’s strange plot, faith questions, and Rami Malek’s acting. No specific complaint says that the film pushes DEI, identity politics, or activist content.
0%
Creator track record context
Sarah Adina Smith has a supplied score of 21, and her title interviews focus on fate, God, love, and freedom. Several producers have supplied scores from 40 to 62 because they support women-directed or social-issue films. Jonako Donley has a supplied score of 0. This gives the project a mixed creator track record signal, with most of the higher context coming from producers rather than the film’s story.
39%
Production
Movie · 2017
Barcelona, Spain. Adrián Doria, a young and successful businessman accused of murder, meets one night with Virginia Goodman, an expert interrogation lawyer, in order to devise a…
Movie · 2017
Susan, a single mother of two, works as a waitress in a small town. Her son, Henry, is an 11-year-old genius who not only manages the family finances but acts as emotional support…
Movie · 2017
A service which creates holographic projections of late family members allows an elderly woman to spend time with a younger version of her deceased husband.
Movie · 2020
A once-celebrated kid detective, now 31, continues to solve the same trivial mysteries between hangovers and bouts of self-pity.
Movie · 2017
Dr. Steven Murphy is a renowned cardiovascular surgeon who presides over a spotless household with his wife and two children.
Movie · 2021
A small-town Oregon teacher and her brother, the local sheriff, discover a young student is harbouring a dangerous secret that could have frightening consequences.
Movie · 2016
Porter Wren is a Manhattan tabloid writer with an appetite for scandal. On the beat he sells murder, tragedy, and anything that passes for the truth.
Movie · 2018
Looking to investigate recruitment techniques of ISIS to lure women into Syria, a journalist creates a Facebook profile of a Muslim convert.
