In the very near-future of husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Miriam Louise Arens and Mitchell Arens’ impressively realized feature-length debut, Heartworm, it could be the day after tomorrow.
A family of three, Avena (Amber Gray), Mark (Juan Riedinger), and Zamira (Ellie Reine), suddenly becomes a family of two, leaving Avena, a concert pianist from a family of concert pianists, and her husband, Mark, positively shatttered, lost, and unmoored.
That same near-future, however, has led to a technological leap, NeuraLife, that allows for instant entry and departure into a fully realized virtual world resembling our own. It also allows both Avena and Mark an escape from the life-distorting grief that haunts their days and invades their dreams, turning them into nightmares of loss. But it's also a world where Avena, caught between anguished memories of her daughter playing in their backyard and a fantasy world where Zamira, a princess, frees Avena, a Queen, from the evil Goblin King, Mark, somehow reconstructs a life without Zamira.
For Avena, that path involves group therapy for similarly bereft parents. The therapy group begins every session with a “promise to be present,” a difficult, even impossible, ask for at least some of the attendees. While Mark also attends, it’s out of duty or obligation. He’s not ready to reconcile himself to Zamira’s loss or to even try reconciling himself to what he considers an immeasurable loss, leading to a growing, perhaps uncrossable rift between Avena and Mark.
With virtual technology, potentially a benefit or a hazard, at its center, Heartworm unfolds across several realities: the “real” one without Zamira, Avena, and Mark’s memories, and later, for Mark, Zamira’s seemingly miraculous resurrection within the virtual world. Excited, Mark invites Avena to share his newfound reality. The daughter they both once knew, loved, and lost, alive only in imperfect memories and half-remembered dreams, and the new ghost-like Zamira, a veritable “ghost in the machine,” in effect turn Heartworm into a science-fiction ghost story, leave Avena and Mark with potentially divergent, ultimately contradictory choices.
Unfolding in ever-wider concentric circles, the ambitious Heartworm also examines the indirect effects of Zamira’s loss on Avena’s mother, Lillian (Lillias White), a renowned concert pianist, and Avena’s brother, Steven (Derrick Baskin), a recluse who plays a key, if slightly underdeveloped role in a subplot involving virtual fakery that dovetails thematically with Mark’s discovery of Zamira 2.0 in the virtual world he visits obsessively, all but ignoring the real world or addressing the distance bordering on a chasm between Avena and Mark.
Elevated by a strong, empathetic performance by Tony nominee Amber Gray and remarkably assured direction by husband-and-wife team Miriam Louise Aresn and Mitchell Arens (both also produced; Mitchell handled the cinematography and the editing, and co-composed the score as well), Heartworm, while slow to develop at times and frustratingly vague at others, represents the kind of modestly budgeted, DIY filmmaking guided by a central, unifying vision and an overabundance of ideas all too lacking from past or current releases.
It’s also an object lesson in detail-driven filmmaking, worth studying closely by first-time or wannabe filmmakers.
Heartworm premiered at the 2026 Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival.