Review: Sound of My Voice

I’m simultaneously surprised and not surprised at all that there aren’t more movies about cults being made. There’s so much fertile material for the right writer to work with here: faith, obsession, manipulation, all that good stuff. At the same time, I see the tempting shortfalls. There’s got to be a real struggle between making a movie about cults and about all religions. Granted, there’s a lot of crossover themes between full-on cults and normal organized religion, but taking the easy route and saying either, “all religions are cults,” or “all cults deserve to be recognized as religion” makes for some terrible storytelling.

While Sound of My Voice does falter in other places, it definitely succeeds in telling a solid story on the seductive nature of cults and cult leaders.

Sound of My Voice
Director: Zal Batmanglij
Rating: R
Release Date: April 27th, 2012

Two documentary filmmakers, Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), have infiltrated a mysterious cult over the course of some months, and they have finally been granted access to meet with the cult’s leader Maggie (Brit Marling). Maggie, a sickly, charismatic figure, claims to be from the not-too-distant future of 2054, where she claims the world has been thrown into complete chaos and, armed with the knowledge of comic catastrophes, she plans to lead her group of followers to a safe place. Peter and Lorna, armed with hidden cameras, are eager to prove Maggie as a crackpot and a manipulator, until Peter finds himself drawn more and more to Maggie until, as a test of his faith, Maggie asks him to do something horrible.

I have to say, if someone with the magnetism and sheer presence of Brit Marling tried to recruit me into a cult, I’d probably go right along with it. As show in Another Earth, her most recent film, she is capable of absolute radiance on screen. It’s impossible not to look at her with a certain amount of wonder. With Maggie, you can almost see her pulling the strings of her followers, ever so imperceptibly, drawing them in with the power of her words. When she is crossed or displeased, her fury is a quiet, white-hot rage. Not someone you want to get angry.

Brit Marling is really the only actor doing really quality work here, likely owing to the fact that she co-wrote the script along with director Zal Batmanglij. Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicius, while competent, don’t really bring the urgency and the stakes to the role that are required. These are people that, if discovered, could be in serious danger from, in their minds, a very likely crazy person and her brainwashed followers. I never got the impression, until things got really bad, that either one of them viewed the entire escapade as anything more dangerous than a journalist’s tour of a UN outpost in Belarus: not enjoyable but hardly life-threatening. Denham, his character forced to grapple with more serious issues than Vicius, has a lot more to work with, so he gives a much more interesting performance as a rational man presented with irrational truths. 

The biggest issue with the film is the aforementioned lack of stakes. Until the third act, it’s just a story of two people pretending to be cultists, as one of them slowly becomes more indoctrinated (so it seems). The characters inform each other that things could get very dangerous if they’re discovered, and there are a number of tense moments over one character nearly discovering a hidden camera or learning a secret truth about another, but a lot of the tension deflates itself because the stakes aren’t fully realized. One scene shows a potential cultist, having questioned Maggie’s knowledge of the future, being forcibly removed from Maggie’s basement lair, and that background character is never seen again. While I appreciate the ambiguous nature of this moment, as we don’t know whether he dies or is jus tossed out into the street, it reveals the deeper truth that we just don’t know how dangerous these people really are. They preach compassion and purity, but one of them owns a gun.

It all winds up as an open, dangling plot thread, never revisited and never discussed, let alone resolved. It takes the final act of the film, where characters are finally asked to risk themselves in a very real, terrifying way, a way that very clearly will seriously change their lives, for good and (more likely) for ill, for the tension and the thrills to reach critical mass, and by that point, there’s been such a nonexistant build to that point that it’s almost overwhelming.

What I do really love about Sound of My Voice is the great low-fi, indie sensibility brought to what could have been a really stupid, brassy thriller. The film takes its time, setting up the situation and the characters, and it tells the story. It feels organic and interesting, even if the plot doesn’t exactly break the mold in terms of twists and turns. Whether Maggie really is from the future or not is essentially immaterial, as the story being told doesn’t really have anything to do with those sort of simplistic, binary questions and answers. What matters is the effect a character like Maggie has on the world around her, and what she does to change the people we view as the protagonists. 

Sound of My Voice doesn’t create any radical new storytelling paradigms, nor does it really carry any truly astounding cinematography or performances. It’s a good, solid thriller that stays grounded despite some pretty heady material.