Voices

Apparently, David Hemmings and Gayle Hunnicutt had a terrible marriage although mainly because of Hemmings with his womanising and drinking. Within the film the two actors are all at it again it is drawn from a one-act play and then opened up. They are imagining Don't Look Now or even Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Be something but certainly not and it doesn't even start of the dialogue being effective. A very half the way of a silly ghost story is all it is.

'Voices' (1973) - Kevin Billington.

Following the tragic death of their only child, husband (Hemmings) and grief-stricken, suicidal wife's (Hunnicutt) attempts at reconciliation following her prolonged stay in a mental hospital prove disastrous, since their choice of dilapidated getaway country manor, isn't quite as abandoned as it initially appears. 'Voices' translates well from stage to screen, due in no small part to the very fine acting of real-life power couple Hunnicutt and Hemmings, with Hunnicutt bringing enormous depth and pathos to a complex and challenging role. Shot on film and video, which demonstratively lends 'Voices' a unique, if initially jarring aesthetic, while I'm quite sure it was unintended, this singular approach recalled Brian Clemen's macabre masterclass 'Thriller'. Dissimilar in many ways, there are, perhaps, shared eerie tonalities with 'Images', 'The Innocents', 'Symptoms' and 'Don't Look Now', that strongly recommends Kevin Billington's captivating 'Voices' to those appreciative of nuanced acting, dramatically sound film-making, and artful, slowly scintillating supernatural suspense.

"Voices" is an exceptionally good and intelligently written ghost story. However, before watching it, I have a warning. The couple in the film (David Hemmings and Gayle Hunnicutt) are very depressed after the death of their son. As a result, she's depressed and angry...and he's just incredibly angry. They obviously are a couple who are in deep pain and while I didn't find the ghost part of the tale scary (it was more interesting than scary), it was tough seeing the pair tearing each other apart during the course of the film.

The movie begins with a couple taking their young son on an outing. They are distracted and the boy drowns. Some time has passed and the couple have decided to go to her summer home for a vacation. However, her emotional instability and his being tired of her emotional upheavals set the stage for a gloomy time. However, when they aren't bickering, she begins to hear children's voices...presumably the voices of dead children. Later, she even sees them. And, eventually, he hears them as well. What is going on here?!

This is a very intelligently written film. Despite the awful relationship between the couple, and it's hard to watch at times, the ending really pulls everything together perfectly. A wonderful and atmospheric movie.

A protracted stage play on what looks like low grade videotape bookended by film sequences to remind you what the rest of it should have looked like. Unnaturalistic dialogue that goes absolutely where you expect, delivered with a generous helping of ham. My interest was piqued momentarily when I realised that the child playing John was in the tiger segment of Tales That Witness Madness, and there is a soupçon of guilty curiosity in watching Hemmings and Hunnicutt perform as a bickering couple in the knowledge that their real life marriage was at that time falling apart. Otherwise this is a colossal waste of everyone's time. Move along...

Rather dreary British-made ghost story involves a bickering couple hoping to restart their marriage after a long period of mourning over the death of their child, who drowned while on a family outing at the lake. The wife, who later slashed her wrists and was institutionalized, blames herself and her husband for their son's accident (they were making love instead of watching him), while the husband feels the past is dead and it's time to move on. After the wife inherits her aunt's isolated estate, the shaky twosome drive out to the fog-enshrouded countryside to spend some time together, but she is unnerved from the moment they arrive--and is alone in hearing a child's giggle coming from the next room. Quite obviously adapted from a play, this talk-heavy piece hits an early wall in the first act with the husband (David Hemmings) making numerous attempts to warm up his spouse (Gayle Hunnicutt), while she alternately invites his advances and pushes him away. The material might have been more tolerable if the set wasn't such a gloomy eyesore--and if Hunnicutt's character wasn't so impossibly mercurial. For those who stick with it, there's a plot twist in Act Three that is successfully pulled off, although it renders much of the rest of the picture pointless. George Kirgo and Robert Enders (also the producer) adapted Richard Lortz's play, which ran on Broadway for a scant eight performances. ** from ****