Sound of My Voice Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Sound of My Voice Blu-ray Movie Review

"She's a con artist. She's dangerous. That's why we've gotta make this film."

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater October 22, 2012

Between The Master, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Sound of My Voice, it seems that cults are the indie drama topic du jour. And why not? They certainly provide fertile subject matter. The seductive leaders, the gullible followers, the manipulation and misguided faith and misplaced reason—cults give us a microscopic insight into our collective ability to put hope ahead of logic, to smother our doubts in denial. They're dangerous precisely because they exploit the vulnerabilities in positive human traits—like optimism and a desire to belong—warping them into a twisted, insular attitude. Plus, they're plain old creepy, which tends to play well on screen.

Of the three films above, Sound of My Voice has the smallest scale—it's practically a no-budget production, shot on prosumer-grade DSLRs— but it certainly isn't short on big ideas or emotions. The movie stars and was co-written by Brit Marling, who pulled off a similar feat with last year's Another Earth, which told a compelling sci-fi story using minimal special effects. Here, with co-writer/director Zal Batmanglij, she confines her script to a handful of characters and even fewer locations, proving once again that it's possible to craft an engaging film with little money and lots of dedication.

The film has a smartly disorienting cold open. We watch, confused, as a twenty-something couple, Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), nervously follow a set of enigmatic instructions from a print-off. They pull their car into the garage of a suburban house, where a man frisks them, orders them to remove their jewelry, takes their wallets, and commands them to take a shower. ("Be thorough with the soap.") Is this some sort of weird Craigslist sex hook-up? Not quite. After they wash themselves, they put on white patient robes—the doctor's office kind that tie in the back—and are led into a minivan, where they're blindfolded, cuffed, and driven to another house, where ten-or-so similarly attired cult members are waiting in the basement. Peter and Lorna are about to be initiated.

The leader of this secretive little group is Maggie (Marling), who enters the room with a white veil over her face, pulling an oxygen tank behind her. Unmasked, with long blond hair, she looks like your average yoga class participant, and she talks with a laconic and soothing California drawl. "Hi, it's nice to see new faces," she says, defusing the tension, and she proceeds to tell her story for the inductees. The short version? Maggie claims to be from the future—2054, to be precise—and says that she's come back to prepare anyone who will listen for the difficulties soon to befall America. She doesn't get into specifics, but it seems there will be some sort of economic/technological collapse, returning society to a more agrarian lifestyle. Her followers practice meditation and engage in psychobabble-laden exercises meant to rid themselves of "logic, reason, intellectual bullshit."

"They're weak," Peter says to Lorna back at home, "and they're looking for meaning. These people are suckers, and that's it." As it turns out, the pair are not seekers, but rather investigative would-be documentarians hoping to expose Maggie as a charlatan. Peter—motivated by his western-medicine- opposed mom, who died of cancer when he was a kid—even has a tiny camera hidden in the thick rims of his glasses, feeding video to a memory stick he swallows before meetings. But the deeper Lorna and Peter get inside the cult, the more emotional control Maggie exerts over them. Her mystique is impossibly alluring. Is she for real? A simple shyster? A deluded New Age guru-type who's brainwashed herself into believing her own fantastical claims? As Maggie holds sway over her new acolytes, Marling and director Zal Batmanglij screw with our heads, giving us reasons to both believe and question what we see.

The film's key strength is that it accomplishes much using very, very little. There are no special effects here, no flash-forwards to some hypothetical future, no complex sets or flashy costumes; Sound of My Voice gets by on a suburban basement, a few white robes, and a series of tense, psychologically manipulative encounters. The most powerful scene has Maggie telling her followers to eat apples—are they poisoned, we wonder?—and then hinting that the apples represent conventional thought and should be thrown up. One by one, the initiates gag themselves into puking out the contents of their stomachs, except Peter, who's worried about revealing the thumb drive he's swallowed. Maggie questions his allegiance, calls him an "anal retentive prick who can't dance, can't breathe," and then—using mind games or perhaps real powers—looks into his psyche and reveals a traumatic incident from his childhood. He finally vomits—a figurative and literal purging—and finds himself surrounded by the other members, who embrace him in a teary-eyed group hug. You can see why insular cultish activities can be so addicting and self-reinforcing.

At a key juncture in the story, Maggie asks Peter—without giving too much away—to do something that's morally indefensible, and this eventually leads us to a rather wimpy, underdeveloped ending that doesn't resolve any of the core mysteries and, in fact, raises a new question that may harangue viewers hoping for closure. If it goes out with a slow fizzle, rather than the concussive bang that the plot initially seems to demand, Sound of My Voice is still a potent example of low-budget/high-concept filmmaking. As a writer/actor/producer, Brit Marling really is an indie triple threat, and I'm curious to see what she might be able to pull off with moderately better resources.

Sound of My Voice Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Let's cut Sound of My Voice some slack when it comes to picture quality. The basically no-budget film was shot entirely using off-the-shelf DSLRs —the Canon 7D—which have come a long way in the last few years, but can't quite rival the clarity and comparative noiselessness of the Red One or other more expensive digital rigs. And then you have the fact that a great majority of the film takes place in a basement, with dingy yellow lighting. So, no, Prometheus this ain't. But that's okay. Sound of My Voice is further proof of the democratization of filmmaking—that literally anyone with the cash to buy a prosumer-grade camera can feasible make a feature-length film. You may have to overlook some compression/source issues here—slight banding in fine color gradients, heavy aliasing in a few shots, very digital-ish noise in darker scenes—but considering the way the film was shot, the picture looks great. Although the image is a little soft, as you might expect, there's never any doubt that you're viewing material natively shot in high definition. And during the few scenes set outdoors during the day, the level of clarity actually goes up considerably. Color has been graded slightly to add pop and contrast, but the overall looks is very realistic, particularly in those dim fluorescent basement sequences. Sound of My Voice looks as good here as it's probably ever going to look.

Sound of My Voice Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sound of My Voice is inherently a very quiet, dialogue-driven film, so the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track featured here really doesn't have much to do. That said, it does exactly what it needs to with a decent sense of overall clarity, especially for such a low-budget production. The characters' conversations are relayed with balanced, clear, easy-to-understand voices—no distracting hisses or muffling here—and there's some low- level environmental sound mixed in at least some of the time, along with a few rare rear-channel effects. Assisting the movie's tone is an ambient score from Vampire Weekend instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij—yes, the director's brother—and it purrs along nicely, using lots of backward-masked samples. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, along with a descriptive audio track and French and Spanish dubs, all in Dolby Digital 5.1.

Sound of My Voice Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Sound of My Voice (1080p, 4:15): A quick featurette with interviews with the writer and director.
• Maggie Featurette (1080p, 3:00): A short piece about Maggie's seductiveness as a character.
• Fox Movie Channel Presents: Direct Effect Zal Batmanglij (SD, 4:58): An overview of the film and interviews with director Zal Batmanglij.
• Fox Movie Channel Presents: Writer's Draft Brit Marling (SD, 4:57): Likewise, Marling discusses the film's story and themes.
• Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 2:24)
• Sneak Peaks (1080p, 9:23)

Sound of My Voice Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Sound of My Voice may not have the star power of The Master, or even the meager budget of Martha Marcy May Marlene, but it still delivers an insightful, dangerous-feeling view of the inner workings of a cult. After last year's Another Earth, writer/star Brit Marling has proved yet again that you don't need massive studio resources to tell a compelling sci-fi-influenced story. The film peters out somewhat in its last act, but its a gripping, disorienting experience on the whole, and certainly worth a watch for those more interesting in character and concept than CGI spectacle. Recommended!