Sound of My Voice

Cults seem to be in right now. At the beginning of the year, Martha Marcy May Marlene brought us a tale of the residual effect of such a break from normality, once a person escapes. Working backwards, Sound of My Voice depicts the bewitching process by which a person becomes ensnared.

Opening on the induction of two couples into a mysterious cult somewhere in the LA valley, the film wastes no time in hinting at the darker aspects of these groups. The strict requirements of washing the body and handing over personal possessions are reminiscent of arriving at a prison, an image underlined when they are handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven to a new, protected location. Once there, and once they have performed an elaborate and childish secret handshake, they are introduced to the cult's leader and focal point, Maggie (Brit Marling). She praises their faith in coming so far, and 'rewards' them by revealing her secret, and the cult's raison d'etre: she is from the future, and has come back to help people prepare for a coming disaster. After the session, one couple, Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), turn out to be posing as believers in order to expose the cult before it becomes dangerous.

Initially, the approach taken towards the cult phenomenon is one of examining the reasons people feel attracted to them. Both Peter and Lorna are given brief but suggestive backstories: he lost his mother at an early age largely due to her involvement with a cult; she had a wasted adolescence and now spends her time trying to make her life as worthwhile as possible. Both also clearly have personality features that could be seen as susceptible to such manipulation: he the obvious loss of a nourishing parental figure; she, it is claimed outright through the voiceover, is merely exhibiting another facet of an addictive personality otherwise expressed through her health foods and noble causes. Furthermore, whether accurate or not, their unfounded conviction that the group is bound to at some point grab guns and start shooting people comes across excitable and reactionary itself, and those impulses can easily be imagined turned to the use of leaps of faith and twisted reasoning. The script does a good job of presenting the seductive ambiguities of Maggie's story, and there's a nice nod towards the exploitation of existing powerful mythologies in a scene involving apples which embody rationality, logic, and "intellectual bullshit", and which the cult members are expected to reject.

This is not kept up. There's a point when the film shifts gear in order to keep the story moving, and in the final act it becomes more of a thriller, pushing the behaviour of the protagonists to see how far they will go to get what they want. In all fairness, the ambiguity as to whether the two have actually been taken in by Maggie's story does generate a fair bit of tension, and the final twist is undeniably satisfying. However, it's satisfying in the same way as the twist in The Usual Suspects, in that it's not so much a twist as a casting of doubt upon a large chunk of the narrative up to that point: plenty of impact, but a storytelling stunt more than anything else. Sound of My Voice is a great showcase for using uncertainty as narrative drive, but it fails to escape from its own fog. Doubtless it can be argued that that's the point of the film, but sadly it ultimately comes across more as the writers not being able to make up their minds how to end it.
Tom