There's a real low-fi artistry to Christopher Monger's Voice Over, the beautifully grainy unrestored 16mm and handheld photography giving it a positively dirty atmosphere; an atmosphere that offers a bold, ambitious feature that challenges notions of gender and defies certain comfortable narrative tropes. The stark reality of human interaction in the more abrasive 20th-century charts the course of the complete self-destruction of its main character, Fats, whose precarious sense of self is entirely dependent on the perpetuation of a fantasy. In trying to lose the kitsch appeal of his work, Fats ultimately commits creative vandalism to pander to his newly discovered youth crowd, with this vandalism comes growth. The film then takes a darker turn with what seems like a significantly missing scene from the narrative, but this superbly ambiguous turn works to the film's advantage, magnificently setting Fats up as a potential monster and, simultaneously, a good Samaritan, you choose; in deliberately leaving out this event, it lets us judge Fats' subsequent actions from very liquid foundations, with further power stemming from Ian McNeice's powerhouse performance. We are morbidly invited to climb into his mind in the same way we'd enter a condemned building, you know it's going to collapse but you don't know when. An intelligent and darkly pondering study on loneliness and detachment, Voice Over will challenge you as you bare witness to a mind crumbling dangerously in front of you, a quasi-artistic schizoid fracture, unspooling like a reel of film. Truly gripping stuff.
