The idea is appealing, and the leads competent, but there's an obvious emotional deficiency in Till Human Voices Wake Us. Everything here is just too fluffy and metaphysical to have any real human weight to it, and though it probably read well on paper, the actual realization leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps most
telling is how the music cues seem to be working double-time to cover up the odd lack of feeling throughout the movie, as if the filmmakers weren't content to let the interplay between our actors stand on its own. Honestly, they were right, but no amount of swelling strings and orchestral heart-tugging could have fixed the fact that everything simply falls short.There's nothing wrong with a movie being slow, but this movie really needed to develop its characters well to work, a task at which it fails. Sam and Silvy just seem like two moony youngsters making doe-eyes at each other, and grown-up mustachioed Guy Pearce half-heartedly works through an expressive block through most of the movie. The 50/50 split between Sam's youth and his adulthood, where he's visiting his recently deceased father's estate, may be to blame for this. We learn that a past relationship has been haunting him all his life, a relationship which is underdeveloped and difficult to care about; in turn, since we don't know much about adult Sam either, it becomes similarly difficult to care about his path to redemption and acceptance. Really, the movie is a wash. If you view it as a sort of fable, or a metaphorical treatise on lost love and coping, then the results may be watchable. Other movies have done it twice as well, however, and I suggest you defer to Last Life in the Universe if this sounds even remotely interesting to you.
March 31, 2010
Top Critic
