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My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To

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“Do you have any idea what we do to get that blood?”
Dwight and his sister Jessie reach a crossroads over what to do about their younger brother Thomas' mysterious illness. The increasingly dangerous task of keeping him alive weighs heavy on sensitive Dwight, and as a fiercely private and close-knit family unit, Thomas and Jessie depend on him and the rituals they've learned in order to keep their secret. Dwight yearns for another life, but Jessie will stop at nothing to keep her family together.
Year
2021
Director
Jonathan Cuartas
Writer
Jonathan Cuartas
Starring
Patrick Fugit Ingrid Sophie Schram Owen Campbell
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Press

  • “A visually striking meditation on obligation and complicity.”

  • “Its sad, furtive characters still linger in the mind well after the blood they've spilt has dried.”

  • “It's an entire meditative, brooding feature that centers on the question of how far you would go in the name of family.”

  • “Jonathan Cuartas's film vividly diagnose a sickness of insularity endemic to middle-class America.”

  • “A striking new vision of vampirism that in arterial spurts recalls Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In and Jim Mickle's We Are What We Are.”

  • “A quietly absorbing, small-scale enterprise with some moments of genuine tension.”

  • “Cuartas' film looks to take a restrained and realistic approach with vampire mythos anchored by great performances as lifeblood is pumped back into one of horror’s oldest concepts.”

  • “Fugit steps up to the plate, delivering an indelible portrait of familial devotion taken to its logical extreme.”

  • “A shockingly relevant tale of loneliness, illness, and dependency.”

  • “A gem of a horror film.”

  • “A beautiful cinematic meditation on sacrifice.”

  • “Oxygen may feel as if it’s at a minimum in the world that Cuartas has created, but that itself feels like a breath of fresh air...”

  • “A splendid drama that puts a twist on the vampire genre.”

  • “An unflinching look at the lengths people will go to for family ties, but it’s also a story about loneliness, a story which you know is going to collapse in on itself at some point.”