“Sound of My Voice”
Martha Marcy May Marlene wasn’t the only movie about cult indoctrination at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. There was also Zal Batmanglij’s debut film, Sound of My Voice, which finally hits Toronto screens this week. It’s easy to see why MMMM stole all the attention — it’s hushed, austere, and deliberately vague in a way that suggests art. But MMMM also lacks depth, scoring easy points off its two yuppie characters and failing to convey what attracted the young protagonist to the Manson-like cult in the first place. Sound of My Voice, a more traditionally shot and structured film, burrows much deeper, although still not quite deep enough.
The thriller scenario commences immediately, with a twenty-something couple pulling into the garage of a suburban home somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. “You ready?” asks Peter (Christopher Denham). “Yeah,” says Lorna (Nicole Vicius). With that, they step out of the car and meet a stern-looking fellow with hippyish hair who sends them to separate bathrooms to shower and put on white robes. Then they’re blindfolded and driven to another home somewhere nearby, where a dozen or so other robed individuals await. The two gain entry via an elaborate secret handshake that’s more like a game of paddy-cake, then a door opens and a beautiful, ethereal young woman (Brit Marling) enters wearing a white cowl, trailing an oxygen tank, and smiling a beatific smile. Her name, she says, is Maggie, and she has come from the year 2054 to warn of an imminent civil war.
Before we go too far down the rabbit hole, Batmanglij cuts to Peter and Lorna at home later that night. As it turns out, they’re investigative reporters looking to expose Maggie, and they’re flushed with adrenaline at having finally breached her inner circle. Peter, who works as a teacher by day, is openly contemptuous of Maggie and her followers. “She’s a con artist, and they’re weak and looking for meaning,” he says. But Lorna, a frustrated author of some sort, is freaked out by the whole thing, and finds she can’t completely dismiss Maggie. “But what if she is from…?” she starts, then trails off, knowing how ridiculous she sounds.
One of the film’s more interesting twists is that it’s Peter who turns out to be the more susceptible of the two. While he continues to believe Maggie is a fraud, Maggie picks up on his skepticism and begins challenging him. Suddenly, her peace-and-love demeanour gives way to aggressive encounter-session probing, and she ferrets out so many of his innermost fears and anxieties that he’s reduced to tears. At this point, the suspense becomes two-pronged: not only do we want to know who Maggie is and what she’s after, we want to see if Peter will succumb to her spell. In this way, the movie taps into a fairly common anxiety of modern secular types: that belief, no matter how seemingly misdirected, is stronger and more edifying than disbelief.
Early in the film, Lorna talks about bailing on the whole operation, but Peter talks her out of it by reminding her how rudderless their lives have been up until now. “I can keep teaching, you can stay home writing and surfing the web all day. On the weekends we can go to art installations and get wasted,” he says. “Don’t you want to do something that matters?” At first, all that matters to him is exposing a fraud, but after Maggie gets him confronting his demons, he begins ever so slightly to doubt himself. Maybe believing in Maggie wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.
Batmanglij co-wrote the script with Marling, and their original goal was to turn it into a web-based serial. The movie still bears vestiges of that format — it’s divided into 10 short chapters — but it never feels jagged or stop-and-start. If anything, the serial approach may have forced Batmanglij and Marling to cut out the usual filler and keep the plot moving. At 84 minutes, it’s an admirably tight, fleet movie. And though it doesn’t have the art-film veneer of Martha Marcy May Marlene, it has its own moody, lo-fi aesthetic. Much of the movie takes place at night in Maggie’s generic, suburban house, and Batmanglij brings out something menacing in its over-lit, unfurnished interiors. It’s as if sinister things are going on in the house right next door to yours.
As Peter and Lorna, Denham and Vicius are mostly just adequate, but Marling is stupendously otherworldly as Maggie. When she first appears, she’s like Lady Gaga having fans over for tea, and she has some of the pop star’s soothing, saviour-complex vocal rhythms. Later, when Maggie needs to get tough with a few of her more questioning followers, Marling unleashes just the right amount of controlled rage. The scene in which she’s caught out in what appears to be a flagrant lie is expertly played, a demonstration of how the most assured con artists can turn even suspicion to their advantage. Marling took a bit of heat from critics for her previous starring vehicle, Another Earth, which proved to be a highly touted disappointment. But in Sound of My Voice she makes good on her early buzz.
The major failing of the movie is its climax, which is both too abrupt — we want to see how Peter and Lorna deal with its aftermath — and disappointingly shallow. Instead of focusing on Peter’s growing vulnerability, it focusses on a much more banal, movie-ish concern: the possibility that Maggie is, in fact, from 2054. I’ve never understood why these sorts of illusion-versus-reality shell games have so much appeal for audiences and filmmakers. Movies themselves are illusions — nothing we see is really happening — so why be coy? Do people actually find themselves wondering, days after, if Leonardo DiCaprio is still dreaming at the end of Inception or if Michael Shannon is actually clairvoyant in Take Shelter? Like those pictures, Sound of My Voice ends inconclusively, but because the questions it poses are limited entirely to the world onscreen, there’s nothing to take away, nothing to make us look at our own world afresh.
After seeing the film, I learned that Batmanglij and Marling planned to take the story much further — that what we see here is but the first portion of a mapped-out five-season arc. If that’s the case, the non-ending is easier to forgive, but what are the chances we’ll ever see the rest?
Dark Shadows
Watching Tim Burton’s limp, enervating Dark Shadows, it occurred to me that Burton could really benefit from a couple of massive flops. Maybe then his backers would insist on a good or simply coherent screenplay before green-lighting his next picture. Freely adapted from the campy late-’60s soap about an 18th-century vampire who finds himself in modern New England, Dark Shadows has a great look — gothic grandeur meets Age-of-Aquarius garishness — but that’s about all it has. Burton surrounds Johnny Depp’s courtly vampire with a whole cast of oddball characters — Michelle Pfeiffer as a severe matriarch, Helena Bonham Carter as a boozy psychoanalyst, Jackie Earle Haley as a creepy groundskeeper, Chloe Grace Moretz as a petulant teen — but he gives them nothing to do except stare, slack-jawed, at Depp’s rote, repetitive fish-out-of-water cultural blunders. And Depp himself isn’t doing anything he hasn’t done a million times before. Maybe it’s time for him to quit the Lon Chaney Jr. act and try playing a flesh-and-blood human again.
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Scott MacDonald writes about cinema for Toronto Standard.
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