My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To

In My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To, directed by Jonathan Cuartas, two siblings (Patrick Fugit as Dwight and Ingrid Sophie Schram as Jessie) struggle to make ends meet while caring for their ill brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell). Jessie works as a waitress in town, while Dwight doesn't seem to have a job other than to try and fetch the only ailment that helps the sickly Thomas: human blood. Given that Thomas needs to drink blood, it should be quite clear what actually is going on, and I don't think that's a spoiler because we see Dwight and Jessie collecting blood (in a manner you can probably guess) before giving it to their brother, who drinks it in bed. Oh, and he can't go outside during the day. 

These acts of murder and bleeding have become ordinary to the siblings, especially Jessie, who seems the least fazed (at least on the surface). Despite occasionally showing signs of cracking, her steely resolve allows her to sing along to songs on TV even though she stays up late into the night to take care of Thomas before going into work again the next day. Dwight, however, is a wreck, losing more and more of his humanity with each kill. Things start to get complicated for the three: Jessie might target someone Dwight cares about in order to feed Thomas, Dwight soon starts to feel that he cannot keep doing these horrendous acts, and Thomas just wants a friend. One of the interesting things about Cuartas's screenplay is that Thomas' "illness" is never named. Dwight and Jessie only talk about how he's not getting any better. The audience, though, obviously knows what's really going on, yet in the film's mythology and universe, it seems that no one has ever heard of vampires, similar to how the word "zombie" is never used in The Walking Dead. To Dwight and Jessie, there are no vampires, just a sick brother, and they don't know how else to help him. The things we do for family. 

A typical rule of thumb in viewing movies is that if nothing happens in the first twenty minutes or so, nothing will happen for the rest of it. With this one, things certainly happen, but they happen at such a slow pace that some audience members, even horror fans (who often are among the most loyal to their beloved genre) may be turned off. While it is slow moving, this unhurriedness is punctuated with moments of intense violence. Because of this, the strongest element of this film is its tension. It's worth mentioning, though, that while it is a violent horror flick, it employs violence in the classical sense; that is, you don't see much of it. However, even if you can't see it, you can hear it, and you most certainly can imagine it, so there's a strong chance the hand will go up to cover the images on the screen.

While I liked the My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To, the biggest problem I had with it is that the whole thing doesn't feel very original. It reminded me too much of the Swedish film Let the Right One In, which had a Hollywood remake a few years later. There's also the 1997 novel Thirsty about a teenage vampire, as well as the film Only Lovers Left Alive about modern-day vampires contemplating their existence. But one interesting bit of novelty with the movie is its decision to focus on poor and working-poor characters (protagonists and victims). Typically, the horror movies that come to mind center on middle-class folks and above (think the suburban teenagers in Halloween and Scream or the rich families in The Exorcist and Hereditary), but this film's setting and characters almost make it feel like it's hinting at being allegorical. 

At any rate, Fugit, Schram, and Campbell all do a fantastic job in these sympathetic portrayals of three family members trying to survive, especially Thomas, who just wants to be a normal boy. In fact, I thought it probably would have been more interesting if the filmmakers had cast a younger actor in the role (perhaps someone around Jacob Tremblay's age or younger), which would have made his mannerisms and the way the three of them act around each other much more believable. Campbell was about twenty-four years old during film, and his age seems to make the situations awkward at times.   

If you can tolerate the deliberate pace of the film, My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To is a recommendable film. It's scary and unsettling, sure, but not gratuitously so. So if you prefer your horror films to have lots of gore, rest assured that there is plenty of blood in this movie.