[FILM REVIEW]: My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To

The heart is a lonely hunter in Colombian-American Jonathan Cuartas’ new film about two siblings, Jessie (Ingrid Schram) and Dwight (Patrick Fugit), who stalk, kill and spill the blood of unassuming and easily forgotten victims to feed their younger vampiric brother, Thomas—expertly played by Owen Campbell. Much has been made of the biblical lengths that a family will go to survive, which makes My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To an especially pertinent allegory during the dark days of a pandemic when the pallor of death and disease has swept across the world. In the canon of vampire films, this one belongs at the top of the most eerie and brilliantly crafted, with an insouciant blackness that continually makes these characters with a predominantly blood-based diet so fascinating. Like F. W. Murnau’s iconic 1922 silent film, Nosferatu (released at the tail end of another deadly pandemic), or Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish classic, Let the Right One In (2008), and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To is an instant cult gem that seethes with uncanny pathos, despite the unrelenting physical and psychological violence. The film’s pacing, while creeping at times, like a slow penumbra, makes for a vivid and gripping filmic experience, and each scene is cast in a domestic, near-Gothic painterly glow, thanks to cinematographer Michael Cuartas (the director’s brother).

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To opens today in theaters and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms.

Read Our Interview of Cam Screenwriter Isa Mazzei & Star Madeline Brewer On The Occasion Of The Film's Premiere On Netflix →

View fullsize

For anyone who has painstakingly worked to build and curate their Instagram page, only to have it disabled unexpectedly, you know just how devastating the loss can be. For those whose accounts have been hacked, the consequences can be much worse. Thus is the case for Alice (played by Madeline Brewer), a young and ambitious camgirl on the rise, who is relentlessly creating new shows and characters to improve her ranking on freegirls.live, a fictional camming site, designed and created specifically for the film. When Alice’s account is hacked and hijacked by someone with an uncanny resemblance, she is forced to outwit her doppelgänger while watching her own identity, both online and irl, degrade rapidly. Aside from the psychic thrill that the narrative provides, this film offers a refreshing subversion to the standard tropes that come from the sexy, horror genre. From the ways that sex work is represented in the film, to the ways that the screenwriter, Isa Mazzei and director, Daniel Goldhaber challenge the standard director-authorship, this film provides a wealth of new templates to consider that are seemingly radical, yet unsurprisingly, quite logical. In Mazzei and Goldhaber’s Cam, the hyper-indulgent and semi-private world of camming is given life in a way that is instantly translatable by the genre. A surreal, thrill ride that seeps into your unconscious mind and humanizes the very real people that hitherto have been unjustly stigmatized by the film and media industry at large.

Click here to read the full interview.

Cam is available to stream as of today on Netflix.