In a basement, tucked away somewhere within the monotonous Southern California suburbs, there’s a girl wearing white who claims she is from the long run. that is the irresistible pull of Sound of My Voice, the little indie film that caused an enormous stir at the Sundance Film pageant in 2011 and involves theaters, by approach of Fox Searchlight, this weekend. Directed on just about no budget by Zal Batamanglij from a script he co-wrote with the star, Brit Marling, it is a small, incisive movie that worms its approach within you and devours, expertly building tension and dread because it navigates the audience through its central mystery. centered on its razor-sharp execution and ideas instead of its characters, the movie is a lot of of an intellectual wallop than an emotional one, however when it quite deliberately ends on a cliffhanger, you have got no alternative however to raise for a lot of.
Quite ambitiously for first-time filmmakers, Batmanglij and Marling have said they planned Sound of my Voice as a trilogy, and also the any you get into this lean and engrossing film, the a lot of their detailed world-building emerges. we have a tendency to 1st enter this mysterious basement alongside Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), who are infiltrating the cult led by Maggie (Marling) as investigative journalists– though we do not recognize that nevertheless. Intead Batmanglij takes us through the arduous ritual of meeting Maggie, from scrubbing you entire body with soap to being handcuffed and blindfolded, then performing an elaborate secret handshake whereas locking eyes with the aged hippie (Richard Wharton) who is Maggie’s right-hand man.
When the girl herself enters, speaking partly in encouraging platitudes and partly concerning her own disorienting expertise of traveling quite thirty years into the past, Maggie is magnetic and instantly alluring– though Marling’s performance is aloof and laborious to browse, Maggie has the clear, powerful charisma of all history’s nice cult leaders, which power somehow solely grows the a lot of we have a tendency to get to grasp her. Peter and Lorna are naturally skeptical, and Maggie never explicitly proves she’s return from year 2054, beyond creating obscure and foreboding guarantees a couple of coming back war, and the way her followers should prepare for the disasters to return. Batmanglij and Marling cannily avoid giving us a definitive answer, however they additionally make the most of the moviegoer’s natural need to visualize one thing new– we wish to stay with our main character, Peter, and align together with his skepticism, however when faced with a presence as powerful as Maggie and this movie, we’re additionally inclined to believe.
Good review, makes me want to watch!