Sound of My Voice – Mysterious, ambiguous, and intense

Imagine a bowl of ice cream, new flavor, you’ve never tried it before. It starts mild, slow to get to you, but as you continue, it gets deeper and more flavorful. But as you eat the last drop and put that spoon down, you get a strange aftertaste in your mouth. Like something was … missing. Get it?

It’s my extremely clever metaphor for this movie. Clever, right?

So we start in Sound of My Voice (from first time director Zal Batmanglij) with a young couple, Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), each with a fairly boring job, but they yearn for something more. They decide to infiltrate a bizarre new cult, secretly filming it, to create an edgy, relevant documentary. Once they get past the first steps and get into the secret sanctum, they finally meet a mysterious girl, Maggie, played by Brit Marling, who co-wrote the film (Another Earth), who is the center and mostly leader of the group. She makes a crazy claim about being from the year 2054, bringing words of calamity for humanity and how they might survive the upcoming horrors. Her words are just ambiguous enough that the aspiring journalists find themselves wavering on their skepticism, sometimes one, then the other.

We also see snippets of two seemingly unrelated characters. An older woman, new in town with unknown motives, and a young odd girl in Peter’s class (he’s a teacher) with compulsions and a lack of social abilities. But they draw together, as the woman claims to be a government agent tracking down the cult, and as for the girl … well, she becomes a crucial aspect of the story. But the movie then becomes both ambiguous (which it had been, in the “Is she for real?” way you’d expect) and explicit. Meaning that without explanation, multiple versions of reality are introduced that are entirely mutually exclusive and not fully explained, and then the movie ends without an answer. Normally I’d be fine with ambiguity for this sort of story, but in this case, it seemed like the movie built up too much without resolving, and wasn’t ambiguous, but illogical. That’s a different thing altogether.

There’s still a lot of good in this movie. The acting is great in general, with the nervous energy of Peter overcoming the more subtle aspects of Lorna’s character, although some of the tertiary characters aren’t developed enough to be anything other than mostly forgettable. But Brit Marling as the mysterious Maggie is the star of this story, with an entrancing, beguiling performance designed to confuse and mystify you. Although we start with the story already in progress, meaning it can be a bit confusing and slow at first, the movie gets more intense and gripping before the ultimately disappointing ending. In some ways, it sets itself up for a sequel, which is fine, but I would have preferred for the movie to truly seem a complete story, and I don’t think it quite does that.

Clacked by Jeremy Fogelman
on Apr 27, 2012 @ 00:00 EST5EDT