My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To
“I’m just trying to help,” Dwight tells the man he found foraging in a back alley; the words are true, but it’s not homeless man he’s trying to help so much as himself, the easiest way to fulfil a grim and unending task he would rather not be burdened with, telling the man that he is being taken to a shelter as they drive under the foreboding sky to the hills.
It is dark by the time they arrive at the house above the city, at the edge of the suburbs with forest behind, where Dwight overpowers him and carries him to the kitchen to drain his blood with the help of his sister Jessie; thick, rich and fresh, still warm from the body, they feed the blood to their younger brother Thomas, just what he needs, then Dwight buries the remains alongside the others.
The feature debut of writer/director Jonathan Cuartas, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is a bleak yet compelling tragedy of a family afflicted with a terrible sickness, the fragile Thomas (Owen Campbell) listening to the voices of children playing in the sun beyond his boarded up windows, wanting to be with them, to be like them, to be normal for a moment, even if it is only pretending.
His demands reasonable in any normal circumstance, they are asked with a child’s insistence and sadly impossible; Dwight (Patrick Fugit) does what he can but it will never be enough, preying on the homeless as easy targets who nobody sees and nobody will miss; desperate to talk, what would he say? Unable to leave or unburden himself, he talks to an immigrant worker who doesn’t understand English just to be heard.
Her brother’s resolve crumbling and failing in his obligations, Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) steps up with cold resolve; is her choice of target expedience or spite? Cinematographer Michael Cuartas’ almost square frame crowding the characters so there is no room to breathe, there is no escape from each other, from the consequences of their actions or the inevitability that their situation cannot be sustained indefinitely, the shadowed frame bloodless and without warmth, filled the colours of earth, mud and decay.
My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To more closely related to Romero’s Martin than Murnau’s Nosferatu, Andrew Rease Shaw’s soundtrack employs harmonica, an instrument which Alexander Courage once used to empahsise the honesty and simplicity of life on Walton’s Mountain, but this family is what Fox Mulder meant when he joked about the anti-Waltons, fearful of every siren or flashing blue light, every good intention leading to a bad end.
My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To will be available on digital platforms from Monday 28th June
