Disability and motherhood are the two main themes of Nathaniel Nuon’s Voices, but neither of them are explored to any great effect. The story follows blind and pregnant Lilly (Valerie Jane Parker), who can talk to ghosts. She discovers that her unborn baby has been chosen to be a vessel for a soul stuck in limbo to be reborn. Sadly, while this premise is an interesting aspect, Voices itself has barely anything good to its name.
For one, it’s horribly tedious. Clocking in at 108 minutes it’s a good 20-25 minutes too long, and absolutely nothing of consequence happens until the last twenty minutes, making the first three quarters of the film a serious drag. Nuon tries to make things interesting by showing flashbacks from Lilly’s childhood, detailing the accident that blinded her and killed her mother, and her subsequent relationship with her aunt, but these scenes are just as dull as those set in the present day. Valerie Jane Parker’s narration doesn’t help proceedings, either: it disappears for long stretches, but each time it returns it’s somehow more boring than the last.
It’s also a film that reeks of misogyny: given its cast features far more women than men we might hope it says or does something interesting – but sadly not. Every single woman in the film is defined only by her potential as a mother and her relationship to children. There isn’t a single conversation between female characters that doesn’t mention pregnancy, or babies, or children, and it’s utterly nauseating.
Many of the film’s problems can be traced back to its script: not only does it treat its women awfully, but the general dialogue is horrible to listen to. Every conversation feels geared to try to exposit some character information to the audience, or impart some spiritual wisdom onto them. It doesn’t work. None of the characters ever feel like real people, and because of that we’re never given a reason to care about them. And if we don’t care, we can’t be invested. The poor acting across the board certainly doesn’t help the film in any way.
There’s also Lilly’s disability to consider. When settling on a disabled protagonist, in any type of media, there are really two options: the first is to try and tackle societal prejudices around that disability, in an attempt to start a conversation; and the second is to simply have a disabled lead character and not mention it, in an attempt to normalise audiences seeing disabled people on screen. Either of these are fine – but Voices does neither. Lilly’s blindness is talked about so much, but nothing is ever actually said about it. It feels well-meaning on Nuon and Hathcock’s part, but is sadly entirely unsuccessful.
None of these issues are helped along by the fact that Voices can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. It has elements of horror, thriller, and drama, but never settles on one long enough to make the viewer comfortable. There aren’t enough attempts at being scary for the film to be called a horror; the thriller aspects of the story are thrown in at the last minute for no reason at all; and the drama just isn’t intriguing enough to keep the viewer interested.
It’s a shame, because the bare bones of Voices should work – they just don’t. Instead, what viewers are left with is a lumbering, haphazard, uninteresting mess of a film that’s far better left unseen.
