Sunday, August 18, 2013

House of Voices (2004)

I added this movie to my queue after my obsession with Martyrs but I've never really gotten around to watching it.  I was under the impression that it would be in French, but I was incorrect.  In House of Voices, a young servant, Anna Jurin, arrives to help clean an orphanage, Saint Ange, that is closing up.  Anna is hiding a pregnancy, because this is 1958 and I'm thinking it's not kosher for a young single woman to run around knocked up.

The only other people with her at the orphanage are the other worker, Helenka, and a troubled young woman named Judith, who has always lived there, and acts much like a child.  Strange things start happening as Anna's time there wears on.  She hears strange voices, has strange dreams, and starts digging up some strange information about the orphanage's past.  She believes that Judith holds the clues to the history of the place, but it's sorta hard to get information out of this chick.

After much pointless interrogation of both Helenka and Judith and even more various wandering about the building, Anna manages to find an entirely different level of the orphanage, which appears clean, well-kept and modern.  Which is odd, considering the rest of the building is falling apart.  There's all these weird bald kids with zombie eyes, which I think is supposed to somehow link to some accident that happened, but that was never really fully explained either.  But at least they are there right in time to help deliver Anna's baby.

The setting of this movie was really pretty, but that's about it.  The sound was a gigantic pain in the ass.  I had to keep turning the volume up and down and I freakin' HATE doing that.  This movie was just boring, and really has no plot to follow.  It's nowhere near in the same league as Martyrs.  Definitely skip this one.

0 comments: