"Sound Of My Voice" Was One Of The Few Slow Burning Dramas

Even if you know a lot about cults, there's a mystery at the heart of cult psychology that is singular in its creepiness. And that's the mystery of identity: What happens to people as their personalities bend and waver and recede under the influence of the leader and the group? Do their identities change? Or do they, in effect, become ghost versions of who they were? Sound of My Voice, the story of two Los Angeles bohemians who infiltrate a cult to make a documentary exposé about it, is a small-scale, shot-on-DV movie that, in its stripped-down low-budget way, gets deeper into the fascination — the mental horror — of cults than Martha Marcy May Marlene did.

At the start, the two doc filmmakers — Peter (Christopher Denham), owlish and ironic, and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), docile and sincere — are blindfolded and driven to a drab suburban basement, where an elaborate secret handshake — it lasts 30 seconds — allows them to be led to an inner sanctum. There they meet Maggie, the white-robed cult leader, who claims to be from the year 2054. She's played by Brit Marling with a mix of sensuality, hostility, and all-knowing attitude that is freakishly captivating, not to mention a little scary. The rituals are scary too — notably a group regurgitation that looks like something out of a very sick porno. It's all about breaking down who people are, but does Peter get broken down too? Sound of My Voice doesn't follow through on everything it sets up, yet it has a hushed and revealing psycho-intensity. It also has an oh-wow Twilight Zone ending that truly made me go, ''Oh, wow.'

Whether this alleged emissary from 2054 is lying—and if she is, whether she’s doing so with malicious intentions—is left just murky enough to begin causing doubt even in the markedly logical mind of an amateur documentarian (Christopher Denham) who has personal reasons for wanting to prove Marling a fraud. He and his girlfriend (Nicole Vicius) have patiently infiltrated the group and found their way into the inner circle, but aren’t prepared for what they find. Warm but unforgiving, fragile but steely, Marling is a fascinating presence, and Denham is drawn to her for reasons beyond just needing to take her down. Every ominous note the film sounds about the group—a spontaneous lesson in target practice, an insistence on fasting and purging—is answered by another “Well, maybe…”

The film, directed with efficiency by first-timer Zal Batmanglij, is a little too lean, filled with strong scenes that bump up against one another with no space to expand or resonate and an ending that’s unavoidably abrupt. But Marling provides a grave, otherworldly center around which everything else orbits—a wispy blonde apparently dying from her contact with our present, she speaks with a vague, New Age-y mysticism, but is also capable of being grounded, funny, and nothing like a sci-fi martyr. In the film’s best scene, she’s asked by her followers to sing a song from her time. The one she comes up with is familiar, and so audacious a choice viewers will likely think she has to be faking—and then that she couldn’t possibly be passing it off with such sincerity if she was. Who’s to say what will seem new again in the future? Or what vulnerable people will swallow?

If you are looking for pure entertainment then this isn’t the film for you as you’ll be required to think a little bit, but the payoff is both wonderful and frustrating.  The ending will leave you extremely puzzled and your brain may hurt for a bit because the finale can be interpreted in two distinct ways. SPOILER The first way is tsound of my voice still 300x168 Sound of My Voice Review and Red Carpet Interviewso believe that she is actually from the future and what Peter witnessed validates that prospect. 

The second way is to believe that the entire thing was a con and that everybody involved, including the Justice Department and the kid, were in on it from the get go. This is where my brief conversation where Brit comes into play.  She said I should go the romantic route and think positively, so I’m bound to settle on the first theory.