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 stars David Hemmings and the fantastic Gayle Hunnicutt in a bafflingly poor thriller.

It tells the story of a couple who decide a bit of nookie is more important than watching their young child next to a heavy body of water. Child dies, she loses her mind and after recovering go away together to their country home.

Before you know it she starts hearing voices and the question of whether it's in her mind or if something supernatural is taking place comes up.

Trouble is the movie has no pacing, it's incredibly slow and essentially just about a bickering couple and her grief.

Lifeless, boring and with a twist we've seen before but makes little sense here.

The Good:

Gayle Hunnicutt

The Bad:

Looks like a cheap episode of Dallas

So boring

Finale doesn't make much sense

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

I get the impression the creators of The Others (2001) had seen this

An unsual film. Good first act. Great last act. The middle act, shot on videotape, is essentially one long scene of the two characters arguing, apologizing, and arguing again. It feels very much like a BBC adaption of a stage play, and is relatable but reptetive.

However, stick with it; the scenes of what may be either ghosts or hallucinations become increasingly frightening, leading up to a shocking climax where we find out exactly which they are.

Gayle Hunnicutt's does wonders with her haunted gaze, and the fog-shrouded country house location has a nicely ynderstated atmosphere of isolation and dread.

Comparisons to Don't Look Now are apt; there are also similarities to 2001's The Others.

"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.

This movie is quite difficult to locate, which is a shame for horror fans. In the past couple of years, more sophisticated films such as "What Lies Beneath" and "The Sixth Sense" have been giving scary movies a good name. "Voices" is from this class of thriller because it achieves its shocks through the use of story and character interaction, with an ending that leaves you wondering and frightened for days. It is a simple story about a young British couple who want to get away for a short, romantic vacation in a secluded area of rural England. The destination is unfamiliar to both, and the journey there is ripe with dialogue so realistic and ordinary (plain conversation, arguments, reconciliations) that one might initially think "Voices" is an arty, ad-libbed drama as opposed to a horror flick. This mundane aspect is all a ploy to throw the viewer off, however. Once the young lovers find the vacation house, the mood shifts eerily and the sense of something threatening and supernatural surrounds the couple. They become frustrated, confused and hateful towards each other as their romantic weekend slips through their fingers amidst a haunting neither one can identify. The audience are left equally bewildered, because there is no standard, knife-wielding lunatic creeping outside,and there is no demon locked in the cellar. There is merely this sense of accelerating decline in the characters that is fascinating to observe, and we find ourselves needing to know what happened en route that has resulted in this bizarre situation. Ultimately, the final ten minutes of the film answers all of our questions and makes the subtleties we were puzzling over seem more profound...and the couple themselves discover it as we do, with just as much sense of terror.

Submitted by Penny Dreadful, Halifax, Nova Scotia.