My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It to – review

Director: Jonathan Cuartas

Release date: 2020

Contains spoilers

The vampire genre is often used as a medium to explore issues. In the case of My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It to, I read the film as an exploration of the life of a care-giver, of the pressures that come to bear – obviously exaggerated as the one they care for is a vampire but such exaggeration can offer insight…

What the film also does is offer the viewer a relentlessly bleak vision that didn’t offer a character to overly sympathise with – despite strong performances.

Patrick Fugit a Dwight

It begins with a truck driving through twilight into night, Dwight (Patrick Fugit, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant) at the wheel. In town he stops near a homeless man who is searching a dumpster. We see him driving again, the homeless man in the cab. As they pull into a driveway the man comments that it looks like a home – not a shelter. It used to be, says Dwight. We see him attack the man with a bat the victim had found in the dumpster.

bleeding victim

Once indoors, with the body, he manoeuvres the victim into a position on the kitchen table where he can slit the throat of the man and drain his blood into a bucket with a spigot tap at the bottom. With Dwight is his sister, Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), the blood is for their younger brother Thomas (Owen Campbell). He is ill, frail, often unable to walk steadily, his illness sees him sleeping through the day, burning in direct sunlight and only able to digest blood. When they take a bowl to him, he seems comatose but is awakened when a finger dipped into the blood is put to his lips – this reminded me of the grandpa in the Texas Chain Saw massacre. After feeding, Jessie bathes him.

bathing Thomas

So, Jessie works in a diner and home schools Thomas. Dwight must hunt Thomas’ food, whilst selling the cleaned possessions of victims to a thrift store and burying the victims out back of the house. He is also becoming disenchanted with his role. He wants to head to a beach – and fantasises about doing so with a prostitute, Pam (Katie Preston), he sees. Not knowing that her brother visits Pam, and knowing what she does, Jessie thinks she should feed Thomas. Thomas, for his part, craves a normal life; he wants to play with kids he hears outside during the day. He is prone to collapsing and seizures.

fed

I can see what they were trying to do with this and it treads not dissimilar territory that Rose: a Love Story explored but this was so dour, and so languid in pacing at times, that I just couldn’t summon the sympathy needed to support the principle players. Yes, Thomas was in a horrible situation (and as with Rose, we do not get any backstory to his condition – though he is a lot less dangerous being so physically frail) but I drew little sympathy, even less for Dwight and none at all for Jessie.

Ingrid Sophie Schram as Jessie

Because of this lack of sympathy and intense downbeat mood, it becomes hard to recommend this. Moments that maybe should have carried a streak of black comedy – a botched kidnapping, leading to Dwight being injured but eventually getting his target, and the eventual escape, for instance – did not. Moments of tenderness (they have Christmas for Thomas monthly) didn’t make my heart beat for the movie (pun intended) and the odd stolen moment of joy in all that – such as Thomas and the karaoke machine just made me cringe as a viewer, I’m afraid.

sun exposure

What is sad is that the negatives really didn’t come down to poor performance – the performers did what the script called for and their performances were strong. More it was in the script itself and the pace. Perhaps a different mood would have left me more open to the film, after all it does explore an important (and, yes, often dour) social issue around carers and the pressure they are all too often under. Unfortunately, the feeling I was left with makes it unlikely that I would revisit it. Yet it isn’t terrible filmmaking. 5 out of 10 does feel generous but I don’t think it fair to give it less.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK