There used to be a Solar Temple lodge near Montreal. When the strange cult committed mass suicide in the mid-nineties, it wasn't outrage but confusion that devoured people. How could people sink deep enough into their religious beliefs to kill themselves? How does one sink deep enough into his religious beliefs to do anything, really? It's a strange need we have, not to surrender to a mystery greater than us. SOUND OF MY VOICE is a movie about a bizarro cult, but it's mainly about the desperate need to believe in something. It's a low-key piece of cinema that prides itself in doing several little things right, but that dances around its defining moment without ever embracing it.
Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (the oddly beautiful Nicole Vicius) are a couple of investigative journalists working on a documentary about a strange, secret neighborhood cult and their mysterious leader Maggie (Brit Marling), who never leaves the basement she's holing herself in. As they get closer to the inner circle, Maggie takes interest in Peter and it starts affecting his approach to his job. It's also affecting his approach to his day job and his relationship to Lorna. He becomes torn between his ambitions, his demons and a woman who claims she's from the future. On her end, Lorna is drifting away from the project but she has issues taking her distances from her commitment.
SOUND OF MY VOICE thrives in little details, because it doesn't have a strong script. The ideas fueling the storyline are good and original, but the line-by-line dialogue is a little weak. There are entire conversations built with short sentences that don't go anywhere. The delivery of that very script is ultimately made successful through an intimate, almost caressing direction and a minimalistic and subtle delivery from Christopher Denham and Brit Marling in particular. The point of SOUND OF MY VOICE is that you can't judge belief without hard evidence. If you base your judgment on interpretation of non-literal fact, your interpretation is as good as the strange belief you're judging. In that regard, SOUND OF MY VOICE delivers in its own quirky, peculiar way.
The loudest critics of SOUND OF MY VOICE is that it doesn't have an ending. It often is unfair criticism fueled by lazy viewers who cannot deal with lack of resolution. It is justified here though, because SOUND OF MY VOICE goes through excruciating lengths to build a mystery it doesn't solve. At some point, you have to know what you actually are: are you a meditative, morally neutral movie about the power of beliefs or are you a mystery? Because if you embrace a definite genre, you have a few mandatory stops to make. If you make a mystery, you have to solve it because if there is no solution, your viewers will believe you kept it from them. What's particularly infuriating with SOUND OF MY VOICE is that the mystery elements come out of the left field in the middle of the movie, like a crutch to help the movie develop an ending. But it fails to do that.
I'm aware of being very critical here, but I enjoyed SOUND OF MY VOICE overall. It made a strong point about the process of belief through accuracy of statement instead of blindly aiming for emotional overdrive. It's the kind of detail I appreciate a lot. It's a movie that speaks to you as an intelligent being and while it's not a dying breed yet, it's becoming increasingly rarer. SOUND OF MY VOICE is available on netflix and will fit your rainy Sunday afternoon probably as well as it fitted mine. I don't know how I would've reacted if I had paid twelve bucks to see this in a theater, but I can tell you it sure was not a waste of time. I enjoyed this rational, contemplative take on the compulsive nature of belief despite its creative shortfalls.