Both a movie about fakers and a movie that seems to be
faking it, Sound of My Voice is the
sort of film that David St. Hubbins would say toes the "fine line between
clever and stupid," often managing to work against all odds. The first feature by Zat
Batmanglij, collaborating with Another
Earth's breakout star Brit Marling, the quasi-genre film operates as a sort
of puzzle with several missing pieces.
This kind of loose concern with the audience grasping the whole
narrative puts it in the same league as other indie sci-fi breakouts like Donnie Darko and Primer, though going all out and calling Sound of My Voice a sci-fi film would be dishonest.
School teacher Peter (Christopher Denham) convinces his wife
Lorna (Nicole Vicius) to help him go undercover to film a documentary about a
rising cult surrounding self-proclaimed time traveler Maggie (Marling). Maggie has the appearance of a sweet
young woman, clad in angelic white and hooked up to an oxygen machine, but has
a vicious temperament that Peter soon finds himself at the end of "“ and perhaps
respecting. Being a cult leader
and all, Maggie's intentions remain unclear, but more interesting is how
increasingly distant Peter and Lorna are from the audience. For a documentary filmmaker, Peter
doesn't seem too concerned with capturing any footage. Lorna seems simultaneously tempted and
repulsed when invited by a cult member to fire a gun in the woods.
Muddying the narrative further are sequences of a strange
little girl and a paranoid woman, who inevitably intersect with the lead
characters without ever revealing what's really going on. Sound
of My Voice doesn't make a lot of sense, but it doesn't seem like it's
supposed to. Marling and
Batmanglij claim that there is a definitive answer to the many questions the
film brings up, but the piecemeal way the film is constructed suggests that
they may not be entirely truthful "“ or perhaps the film just isn't as well
thought out as it could have been.
Still, the sum is better than the parts because of,
rather than in spite of, the film's obtuse sense of mystery. It's not perfect, but it's a more
curious and ambitious experiment than most first-timers would dare deliver.
