Common Sense Media Review
By Barbara Shulgasser-Parker
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
Disturbing docu examines issues of consent; violence, sex.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 15+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Watch
Videos and Photos
Tell Them You Love Me
Parent and Kid Reviews
What's the Story?
TELL THEM YOU LOVE ME is a disturbing story about an already heartbreaking subject. It asks the audience to contemplate an uncomfortable question: Are some physically disabled people unable to communicate because of physical limitations? Or are some prevented by a lack of intellectual capacity? White Rutgers professor Anna Stubblefield introduces the experimental method called Facilitated Communication to Derrick Johnson, a Black man in his 20s with cerebral palsy. Derrick has been lovingly cared for by his doting mother Daisy and brother John all his life. According to doctors and his family, Derrick has never spoken and possesses the intellectual capacity of an infant. Anna, on the other hand, claims she's trained him to use a keyboard to reveal his complex thoughts. But those thoughts come only when Anna, or one of her surrogates, physically facilitates the communication, the way partygoers guide a Ouija board to spell out supposedly otherworldly messages. Anna claims she's fallen in love with Derrick and that he's expressed his love via keyboard, with her guidance. The husband she leaves for Derrick calls her a "pathological liar and narcissist." Did an able-bodied White woman rape a disabled Black man?
Is It Any Good?
Tell Them You Love Me is no casual watch. The story begins with a plain middle-aged woman talking to the camera about returning to normal life after prison, a seeming treatise on prison reform. But the work of the attentive viewer only becomes more demanding as layer after layer of disturbing information is revealed. Is Anna the even-keeled professor and scientist she presents herself to be or a self-deluded psycho using science to mask an odd predilection?
The film tackles this difficult, nearly unfathomable situation bravely but misses a few steps. The audience immediately wonders if Derrick can express his deep thoughts on his own, with someone else guiding his fingers to the typewriter keys, or do those thoughts only emerge when Anna is the facilitator? Are the thoughts Derrick's or Anna's? The filmmakers don't raise this obvious problem until 59 minutes in and we learn that experts try but can't get Derrick to express complex thoughts using Anna's methods, further suggesting that Anna authored both sides of the "conversations" she claims to have had with Derrick. One of Anna's friends describes her as "naive," but she actually seems incapable of comprehending the consequences of her actions, a fact hardly explored by the film.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about who is more believable: Anna, who claims that Derrick has great intellectual capacity, or Derrick's family members, who have taken care of him for more than 20 years.
How does this movie look at the way race is entwined with assumptions about learning capacity?
Stories about consent between grown-up teachers and teenaged students are fraught with questions of power differential. How do race and disability complicate that picture here?
Does the fact that Derrick is Black and Anna is White alter the questions normally raised in teacher-student relationships? How so?
Movie Details
- In theaters : November 1, 2023
- On DVD or streaming : June 14, 2024
- Director : Nick August-Perna
- Studio : Netflix
- Genre : Documentary
- MPAA rating :
- Last updated : August 11, 2024
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