My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To: Blood Ties

Vampires are typically presented as (ugh) romantic figures, as per the Twilight films, Interview With The Vampire, and varying takes on Dracula. Doomed to see everyone they love wither and die, and oh, how tragic that makes their existence. Of course, this overlooks the fact that their own immortality comes at the cost of innocent lives, so it all feels a little disingenuous and icky to ennoble them. It’s certainly not the only way vampires ever get depicted, but it’s a narrative that has a lot of traction, and is part of why I don’t like many vampire movies.

One vampire movie I do like, as it turns out, is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To. It’s the absolute antithesis of the romantic vampire movie, and more importantly, a bleak, sorrowful story of what it means to care for someone who will never be able to take care of themselves.

The film opens on a truck driving down a winding road at dusk, but the shot doesn’t last long before cutting to a man with a shopping cart, walking by an overpass. He’s rooting through dumpsters, finding stuff to keep. The truck we saw earlier pulls up next to him. We don’t hear what the driver says, but it immediately cuts to the man riding in the truck, telling the driver what he won’t do. You get the sense he’s had to draw these lines with ostensible Samaritans before. The driver says it’s not like that, he just wants to help him. They pull up in front of an old house, and the man says “I thought you said this was a shelter.” The driver says that it is, and the man says it looks like a house. The driver says it used to be...

...and then he hits the man in the back of the head with a baseball bat. He drags the man inside, cuts his throat and drains the blood into a container. 

This is how we’re introduced to Dwight, his sister Jessie, and their brother Thomas. They live on their own in a house in a somewhat shabby suburb of Salt Lake City. Thomas is frail and sickly. He sleeps during the day, and Jessie homeschools him at night, and he survives on human blood. When he doesn’t get enough, he gets really sick. So Dwight and Jessie take care of him, and that includes making sure he gets enough blood to stay alive. When the film opens, it’s clear that they've been doing this for a long time - probably too long. There's a sense of routine, and an equal sense of weariness. Dwight and Jessie's entire lives revolve around caring for Thomas, they scrape out a living between Jessie's job waiting tables and whatever Dwight can scrounge off of the people they kill and what he can make selling their clothes and possessions at a thrift store. Dwight's only moments for human connection come from his visits to a sex worker, delimited by time and money. And Thomas is limited to listening to the kids playing outside during the day, imagining what it would be like if he could be their friend.

Sometimes you get more bestial or feral depictions of vampires, as in Nosferatu or 30 Days Of Night, but this is the first time I can recall seeing vampirism depicted as first and foremost a debilitating illness. It's completely and utterly unromantic. It's hard to get a handle on who they are as people outside of this, but that feels less because they aren't thought-out as characters (they are, and we know who they are through their actions and reactions, looks, the way they carry themselves) as much as it is because this life has left very little of them remaining. Dwight is crumbling under the strain of the things he has to do to keep his brother alive, it’s worn Jessie down to something hard, cold, and ruthless. And Thomas is desperately lonely and largely blameless, so tired of being sick and not being able to lead a normal life. They've been doing this for a long time, they're worn down to the bone, and it's rapidly becoming harder and harder to sustain. The film does an excellent job of not over-explaining. There's no mythos here, no backstory, we don't know how long they've been like this (though Thomas appears to be in at least his adolescence if not older, so quite awhile), no idea how Thomas ended up this way. It is what it is, and this is what they have to deal with, and it's breaking them.

Everything about this film communicates the despair with which our protagonists live. It's set in drab locations that mostly feel like they're being lit by old incandescent lighting, everything dingy and yellowish, exteriors are largely gloomy and overcast, and enough of the film takes place inside, in their home, that you lose a sense of night and day as any regular cycle. It's a quiet film, the score limited to low-key, ambient music or diegetic songs (mostly in they keys of mournful, wistful, and longing) at key moments. Much of the film goes without a score entirely, and the dialogue is sparse, the tired utterances of people who have spent far too much of their lives in close quarters with each other, and the sort of desultory conversations and exchanges we have with people we don't know very well. The oppressive isolation felt by the protagonists is even expressed in an almost-square aspect ratio, so the screen presses in on everyone as much as their circumstances do. There is violence, as often off-screen as on, and it's always ugly, messy, the clumsy fumbling that real violence looks like.

The film does manage the tricky act of keeping the protagonists somewhat sympathetic despite the nature of their existence. They do horrible things, but their humanity is never in doubt. You can see all of the different ways having to live like this has affected each of them. Nobody seems to rejoice in their existence, they're all tired of living this way and the toll it's taken is evident in what they say, how they say it. There’s weariness, resentment, the sense that they know what they’ve had to give up. Even Jessie, the most predatory of the three, seems more the result of a life of grim resolve than someone who takes any kind of pleasure in what she does. It’s as much a family drama as anything else, which makes the third act, something horrifying born from a simple attempt at human connection, hard to watch not just in its violence, but also how heartbreaking it is. Everyone's starting to crack in their own way, and that's really what the center of the film is - the way that caring for anyone who cannot take care of themselves exerts a toll on the caregivers. The last time I saw this idea outlined so vividly in a horror film, it was The Babadook, which is pretty good company in which to find yourself.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon