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My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To

2020 Directed by Jonathan Cuartas

Dwight and his sister Jessie reach a crossroads over what to do about their little brother Thomas, a sickly child with a mysterious affliction.

Patrick Fugit Ingrid Sophie Schram Owen Campbell Moises L. Tovar Judah Bateman Katie Preston Waine Riches Nancy Fong Steve Brown Micah White Adrienne Akers Jesse Brown Gary McLaren Jeffrey Hanson

Alternative Titles

Мое сердце не будет биться, пока ты не прикажешь, Mi corazón no late si no se lo dices, 동생을 위한 절대적 사랑, Mano širdis plaka tik tada, kai tu liepi, Moje serce bije tylko, gdy mu każesz, Meu Coração Só Irá Bater Se Você Pedir, Моё сердце не будет биться, пока ты не прикажешь, 我的心跳你做主

Genres

drama horror

89 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by nick ★★★★ 1

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is a family drama expressed in the form of slow-burn indie horror. It's a metaphoric take on the familial responsibility and its crumbling tolls on the individuals. It's not a crowd-pleaser by any stretch of the imagination, but it has a meditative, mournful touch to it that has the emotional power to resonate with its niche audience.
My Heart is more of a microscopic character study than your typical horror story, as it focuses its lens on two siblings who are bent on keeping their sickly brother alive and hidden from the outside world. It's patient and ambiguous enough to keep the large picture away from the audience until after the…
Review by Micah ★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

A pretty solid entry into the "I'm a vampire, but there's nothing cool or fun about it and my sadness is all consuming" genre.
Review by sirvived ★★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Heartbreaking horror drama using vampirism as a terminal illness that need to be taken care of and how it's taking physical and emotional toll on family members. While it has enough amount of violence and blood, the film focuses on the struggle the older brother and the sister face, how they deal with murders on a daily basis, the guilt, the desperate feeling to escape their situation and free themselves and the loneliness felt by the younger brother. The acting from all three leads is exceptional. It's slow for sure but very hypnotic and emotionally draining. Wonderfully shot and scored throughout. This is definitely going to stick with me. Very easy to recommend this because it's that good!
2021 Horror Ranked
Review by john ★★½

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

(** NIGHTSTREAM FILM FESTIVAL 2020 : FILM #1 **)
I don't know why I never thought of vampirism as a disease, but hey, why not!
This movie borders the line of being something great like every other scene, but unfortunately never goes quite as far or gruesome as you'd hope it would.
Review by Danielle ★★★★

Our families are like emotional vampires. They suck everything out of us. Wow. I wasn’t expecting this film to be so heavy and profound. This will shadow me for a good awhile.
Review by Oliver Swift ★★★½

Didn’t realise that the lead was the kid from Almost Famous until the last 15 mins
Review by Paul Thomas ★★★★ 1

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell it To feels like the scenes in Let The Right One In where the caretaker is doing the mundane, daily familial aspects of killing to keep the vampire child alive, but in this case it's an actual family and the merciless killing is sprinkled within a strong family drama. Picking the victims based on their social status and if they'll be cared about - focusing mostly on the homeless, sex workers and illegal immigrants - was commentary that may have just been narratively conducive to the script, but really speaks to how this family can prey on the targets that we as a society make easy victims through our unsympathetic governance and politics.…
Review by thedayofthedot ★★★★

Fuck. This made me sad
Review by Jonathan Cuartas 6

Looks familiar
Review by 𝕺𝖒𝖆𝖗 ★★★★

I really love it when a movie can be quite shocking and somehow be casual and subtle about it.
My heart can’t beat unless you tell it to does that and even more through its narrow and to a point claustrophobic scope.
The cinematography - while showing so little - tells so much and signals the calm and cold nature of this odd little world we’ve been introduced to.
Lead by a very small and talented cast the movie
carries on to tell a story that ends as calmly as it started with a very beautiful shot.
Review by Geoff ★★★

is this what utah is like
Review by Soumajit Nath ★★★ 4

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

64/100
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Vampires in horror movies are always attractive. Sometimes they help their own human friends and sometimes they sedate people for sucking bloods and sometime they fell in love with some random people in the street or sometimes they are some kind of messiah of mankind who has been appointed to punish the criminals in it's own methods or sometimes they are some folkloric prodigial entity, coming back from dead to lead other people to death. We have got more or less every different angle under a vampire horror genre, we've seen vamparism as an awful curse, we've seen vamparism as some kinda superpower or we've seen vamparism as a side effect of some kinda scientific experiments or we…