Blood is a curious thing. It’s not quite liquid and not quite solid, and it’s always darker and thicker than you remember it being. When used as a metaphor, it can be extraordinarily individualistic — when you put your blood, sweat, and tears into something, you work hard to put your own unique essence into it — or it can be the most communal thing in the world. Blood is the tie that binds a family together (a biological one, at least), and therein lies the rub. Those ties can be a source of comfort or they can be a form of bondage; oftentimes, they’re both. Writer-director Jonathan Cuartas’s feature debut My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To examines these family bonds and asks: How far are you willing to go for your family, and how far are you willing to go to escape them?
Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) are the sole caregivers for their teenage brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell), who suffers from an unnamed illness. The word “vampire” is never uttered in the film, but there’s no other way to describe Thomas’s affliction. He is weak and pale, he blisters and burns if he comes into contact with sunlight, and he lives off human blood. Unlike many cinematic vampires, Thomas doesn’t seem all that monstrous. In fact, he’s rarely frightening at all (though when he is frightening, the horror is eerie and visceral). Most of the time, he just seems like a sick kid who wants to live a normal life.
Many caregivers will likely relate a great deal to Dwight and Jessie’s situation. If you ignore the grislier aspects of Thomas’s condition and the actions his siblings have to take to provide for him, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To plays like a family medical drama at first. Dwight and Jessie constantly worry about paying bills, keeping Thomas as happy as they can, and making sure he has enough medicine. It just so happens in this case that the medicine he needs is blood from fresh victims.
Because of Thomas’s unique dietary needs, Dwight and Jessie must procure “catches” for Thomas, usually in the form of unhoused people Dwight finds on the street and then murders. Interestingly, the siblings shield Thomas from the violence of their actions, presenting him with saucers full of blood rather than offering up recently deceased necks to bite. Thomas is still very much a child, marveling at the paper airplanes Dwight makes for him and asking Jessie if he can go outside and play with other people his age. Monster movies are no strangers to tragedy, and Thomas’s sweetness and desperation to have a life beyond the walls of his home make the film as heartbreaking and devastating as any classic gothic tale about tortured souls.
Much of the tension in the film arises from the relationship between Dwight and Jessie. Dwight is lonely and conflicted, tortured by the murders he must commit and desperate for human connection that doesn’t involve a baseball bat to the head or a knife to the throat. He regularly visits a local sex worker named Pam (Katie Preston). In one particularly affecting scene, he asks her to sit and talk to him after they have sex, sadly yet hopefully holding out a $20 bill to get her to stay in the room with him for just a few minutes more.
If Jessie shares any of Dwight’s crushing loneliness, she doesn’t show it. She is singular in her focus: everything in her life is about making sure Thomas stays safe and has enough blood to drink. She constantly reminds Dwight of their familial obligation — “He’s our brother” — and she seems unfazed by the violence they inflict every day, calmly wondering how much money a gold tooth will bring them when she yanks it out of a victim’s mouth. Jessie is an intriguing microcosm of the film’s class consciousness: she works as a waitress at a diner, offering a hilarious yet terrifying slow-spreading grin when a condescending customer tells her to smile more, but she dispassionately assesses more economically vulnerable people as “good catches” for Thomas due to their disposability in the eyes of society.
My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To has an overwhelming sense of grim melancholy and resignation, like a weighted blanket woven out of dashed hopes, resentful obligation, and innumerable regrets. Even the shocking moments are quiet. Just as Jessie is numb to the horrific things she has to do to keep her brother alive, so too does the film’s desolate sadness numb the viewer to the violence and the acts of betrayal that come easily to Jessie but remain excruciatingly difficult for Dwight. We are still devastated by them (due in no small part to Fugit’s remarkable performance), but even when we are surprised by the film’s horrors, we recognize their inevitability.
After all, blood has a strong pull; you can try to outrun it, but you can never truly escape what’s inside you.
