My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To [2020]
“This looks like a house.
-- It used to be…”
Slow, deliberate, unsettling, and subtly brilliant; My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is the astoundingly good debut film from writer/director Jonathan Cuartas. Following a small slice of the lives of Dwight and sister, Jessie, while they care for their younger brother, Thomas, who suffers from an incurable ailment; Heart gets right to the point and never lets you go. In rare form for film at all, and rarer still for a debut, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To uses every second of its 90-minute runtime with nary a wasted frame for the entire production.
While I don’t think that Heart will be for everyone [perhaps the low IMDB and Rotten Tomato user ratings suggest exactly that] it will certainly be for anyone who appreciates a careful narrative structure and deliberately weighty experience. In the same way that the 2017 masterpiece A Ghost Story hits home for some and doesn't connect for others, a lot of that experience comes down to expectation. Set the time aside, put your phone down, and watch this movie in a serene setting without intermittent distractions. This is one to be absorbed.
From the solid and solemn performances of Patrick Fugit as Dwight, to the energetic and unsettling of Ingrid Sophie Schram as Jessie, and culminating with the perfectly strange and upsetting from Owen Campbell as Thomas, everyone knows their role and plays it perfectly. The score is subtle and enhances every scene while the stunning and anachronistic 4:3 cinematography lends both a nostalgic and artful flair to the entire piece.
As a directorial debut, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is an absolute 10/10. As a film at large, it gets excruciatingly close and only falls short because of a few simple lines of dialogue [changing the word “house” to “home” in the quote above for instance], a couple of editing choices that I felt took away from the mood of certain scenes, and a plot element that wasn’t expounded upon. All very, very, minor things that do not make this film any less excellent.
If you thought A Ghost Story was even passingly interesting, watch this movie. If you enjoyed the cinematography and filmmaking of 2020’s The Killing of Two Lovers, you will like this even more. A final comparison [and a more tangential one] would be the 2013 drama Only Lovers Left Alive. If you liked that, this tells a similarly deliberate and hopeless story, but tells it better. If you didn’t like that… well this is an all around better film.
I absolutely cannot wait for whatever Jonathan Cuartas does next. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is a masterpiece of a film, a herculean feat as a debut, and a touchingly personal journey of loss and acceptance wrapped up in a dark and twisted drama that will stay with you long after the credits roll.
“I don't want to live like this...
-- We have to. We have to...
I don't want to be sick!”
