The Sound of My Voice
★★★★
(2011)
Brit Marling made a bit of a splash at last year's Sundance Film Festival with the ambitious but ambiguous Sci-fi Another Earth. A quietly enthralling mystery that seemed to ride well on one strong idea, which was sadly eclipsed by Lars Von Trier's eerily similar Melancholia, and fell spectacularly hard at the last hurdle, offering only an infuriatingly loose ending and some bland philosophical musings. Once again Marling takes a writing credit, this time alongside first time director Zal Batmanglij and, although The Sound of My Voice rides a similar race, it also delivers a seriously compelling riddle.
Young part time film makers Peter and Lorna (Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicius) have been spending a lot of time researching and planning their infiltration of a small suburban cult. We join them on their initiation night, watch them shower at the behest of a large quiet man, then they are dressed in white, blindfolded and taken to the basement of another house, location: unknown. The small group's leader is Maggie (Marling), an ethereal beauty who claims to be from the future. She tells her story to her lost followers, urges them to prepare for the end of days and, with that, the pair are hooked on exposing the cult for the sham that it is.
Peter's skepticism, spurred on by a loose family tragedy, is the driving force of his quest and although the couple's relationship is tested by the investigation, it's Maggie herself who begins to turn Peter's documenting interest into something much more unhealthy. As the film progresses Peter and Lorna's visits with the cult get very very weird indeed, their doubt and morals skewed by the need to find the truth in Maggie's tall tale.
Batmanglij's film which, in a way, echoes last year's supreme cult paranoia thriller, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and does so with a consistent and beautiful science fiction background hum, opening the door for endless debate in the cinema foyer later on. It's a fine example of a low budget film can play with the perception of a character as well as our perception of the film's own truths. It's also admirably insistent on eschewing a potentially hindering twist for something far stranger.
It's perplexing finale, much like Another Earth, does somewhat miss the mark, but the cult room scenes, tight performances and an often darkly comic atmosphere make The Sound of My Voice a surprising and strangely intense experience.
