Oh, shit. Here we go with what is sure to be a rash of hipster, post-mumblecore indie sci-fi flicks that are totally under-cooked and rely more on young people's love for small and niche things than for anything about good filmmaking and effective storytelling. Following on the heels of Brit Marling's film Another Earth last year, which she co-wrote and starred in, comes Sound of My Voice (there really should be an article there, guys), another movie she co-wrote and stars in (is it just a co-incidence that she co-writes movies and her partners direct them? Seems sorta fishy to me...).
This one tells the story of Peter (Christopher Denham) an intrepid journalist in LA (those exist?) who takes his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius... who got a vicious nose job as a teen, apparently) to a strange cult where they listen to a young woman named Maggie (Marling) who claims to be from the future. It's not clear what exactly Maggie wants them to do or why. She seems more like Jack Lalanne telling them to eat healthy food than Jim Jones or Charlie Manson. Apparently she will ask them to do something soon.
As the film opens Peter is sure that Maggie is a fraud (duh!) but is interested in the scope of her plan. As they spend more and more time with her, and go through more and more unusual tests (there's a handshake they have to do that's an elaborate paddy-cake hand game; at some point Maggie makes all the followers puke on a tarp), Peter and Lorna begin to fall apart as he becomes obsessed with Maggie and Lorna sees her for what she is.
Director Zal Batmanglij does a very nice job with the process part of the story, showing us how the followers have to bathe, get blindfolded and taken to a mysterious spot in the Valley to meet Maggie. There is a lovely dynamism to these sequences. He also does a nice job showing the intimate spaces of the basement and the very quiet, calm moments when the followers meet Maggie.
In the end, this is a decent concept that really doesn't have enough going for it to be a feature (a short about Maggie would probably have been very interesting). By the end of the film (not really giving anything away) it's clear that she is probably a fraud, with only a slim chance that she might be legitimately from the future (again, it's never clear what she's doing now that she's back in our time), but this really isn't all that interesting or important to us. I never felt at all invested in any of the characters, Lorna is rather sympathetic but underdeveloped, Peter seems like an idiot, Maggie is more phantom than person, and the scrappy simplicity of the story belies the fact that it's just not that interesting.
I don't totally get what Brit Marling is doing in this world of ours. She's pretty gorgeous, seems to be a better-than-average actor and a decent co-writer (Another Earth was much, much better than this, though it had issues too with sentimentality). Will she continue to work on the edges of the industry in indie sci-fi or will she be used, for her looks, in more big-budget and studio stuff? I guess I shouldn't blame her for keeping it small for now, but what she's doing is so unusual that it totally makes no sense to me.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
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