Sound of My Voice User Reviews

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Creepy and unnerving are two words I could use to describe Sound of My Voice, the story of a couple who enter into a cult group with the intention of unmasking their leader Maggie as a fraud. The movie was made for next to nothing, so it's extremely impressive that the filmmakers were able to create such a deft and moody little suspense thriller with so few resources. Running a swift 85 minutes, this movie hooks you from its opening scenes of our main couple being cuffed and blindfolded and driven to an anonymous basement and keeps the sense of tension high straight to the end.

A lot of the movie takes place in said small basement, where we first meet the white-sheet clad Maggie, played chillingly by indie newcomer Brit Marling, who claims to have come back from the year 1954 to train a small group of "chosen" people to take on an upcoming civil war which will soon tear the world apart. Maggie has a kind face and calm, soothing voice, yet beneath every syllable she utters lurks a frightening potential for danger and malice. Early in the film, when Maggie tells the group members that they must exhaust their bodies so that they can stop thinking and start feeling, alarm bells go off like crazy. Yet her following is so under her thrall, that they accept her every word, and surprisingly, you will soon find yourself swaying under her gaze as well. What Voice does so well is to keep you constantly on your toes with a splinter of doubt lodged in the back of your mind as to who Maggie truly is; what her motives are. Is she actually a time traveler with great wisdom? Certainly, every aspect of her shady following screams "CULT!" to the viewers, but then again she tells her story with such conviction and magnetic force that you will soon find yourself doubting your own initial skepticism. But there are plenty of clues pointing to her being a fraud as well, and the movie juggles the ambiguity with finesse. If you aren't a fan of highly ambiguous movies, this may not be for you.

There is also the dynamic of the couple who plans to unmask maggie by using a camera hidden within a pair of glasses to capture the groups activities. We learn a little bit about them through brief narration and flashbacks about their backgrounds. The male lead's mother--a member of a cult herself--succumbed to terminal cancer after refusing treatment due to her cult's beliefs. He starts out the most cynical cynic you could imagine, but over time we see something shift. We're not sure what exactly, because we never dive entirely into the minds of the characters, but we can see a distinct ideological shift, a sense of encroaching uncertainty and confusion, and watching this creep into the couple's daily lives and causing conflicts in their relationship is almost as interesting as the scenes in the basement with the actual cult itself.

Some other crazy stuff begins happening in the last act of the film that I won't reveal, but suffice to say those last 20 minutes had me on the edge of my seat. There is talk that this movie may be turned into a trilogy, which I would love, because the mythology and world these guys have managed to build from next to nothing is as fascinating as any I've seen in many bigger budget Hollywood thrillers.