The Voices

Jerry is the sort of guy that life has taken a massive dump on him. He had a mother who was crazy,a father that hated him and he lives in a town that knows his former horrific secrets. Jerry is an uptempo kind of guy, cute, friendly and wants to get on with a normal kind of life. He starts a new job and meets a beautiful English woman. Life looks good, until his his two pets (one dog and one cat) start battling for his sanity. The dog wants him to be a good man,find love and live a normal life. The cat however wants him to kill and then keep the heads of his victims in a fridge.

It is often said that football is a game of two halves, like any sport it can at once from joy to despair and often this is due to a moment of skill or beauty. This actually would be an apt summation of this film. It has two very separate pieces of film technique that work in tandem. They are either excellent or terrible in equal measure and underline the films problems. The first half which are the excellent techniques are the acting, pet narrative and the sets. The acting by Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton, Anna Kendrick etc. They play it both straight and with a little ham for flavor. Reynolds in particular is superb as he mixes real dark, jet black comedy and pathos. He builds a person we identify with and just as much find hard to loath. For after all he is a serial killer and in truth a very unfortunate one. This is well coupled with the pet and head conversations. These are funny, very well filmed and hold your attention. A very rare thing to do with such a strange device but brilliant never the less. The sets are filled with charm, wit and a level of clever construction to benefit the story. This is often the case with films built on narrators that are unreliable that the work has to be done via setting and in the mise en scene. It is not a surprise to see the directors eye for detail, crossing over from comic to film. I am a fan of Satrapi's works. Her comic strips from Persopolis onwards have been compelling and fresh in content and tone.

Now the other half is terrible and this lay in the story itself. As a fan of Satrapi it is hard to say this but for me the story hasn't enough bite or enough black comedy to be rewarding enough to watch again. The audience do become a little dulled by the cat/ dog scenes as they feel a little like a great idea that is over used and so runs its course very quickly. The cat swears like a docker and the dog is the peacemaker. Then we have the heads that can be very irritating and it is a gimmick that does little to add to the exposition. When we have moments of insight into Jerry and his life, these are handled at a distance and this is breaks you out of the moments. The audience also feel a little uncertain about what they want after the killing starts. Should we hope it is all a dream? In the end the film fails because it wants to be too many things to too many people. It reminded me of Lamberto Bava, who made a film in the late 70 called Macabre about a woman who kept her dead lovers head in a fridge. That film was awful and fell apart as the fridge was the coffin lid as such. Where this is a far better film it has however proved to me that films about heads in fridges don't really go anywhere that isn't cold, filled with dead meat or dairy products.