Voice of Shadows
Life has not been easy for Gabriel Verde, the young man who as a boy thought he might one day be a priest, both his parents dead and his own hands bloodied, having killed the man who beat, raped and murdered his mother, their bodies buried in the basement, raising his sister Celeste and escaping with her from Columbia to America where he had hoped they could leave the past behind and start a new life.
His girlfriend Emma a portrait artist, her aunt is the elderly, wilful and eccentric Milda who claims she speaks to the dead; her death sudden and unexpected, also surprising is that her will states that while her entire estate is to be left to Emma it is stipulated that Gabriel must not live with her, the executor Ernesto saying he will turn a blind eye but warning that there may be consequences.
A supernatural horror of haunting and exorcism, Voice of Shadows stars Guillermo Blanco as Gabriel with Corrinne Mica and María José Vargas Agudelo as Emma and Celeste alongside Jane Hammill, Martin Harris and Michael Paul Levin as Milda, Ernesto and the short-tempered Father John who conducts the funeral and accepts no questioning of his authority, with Bee Vang as the more approachable Father James.
The trio reacting differently to Milda’s death, Gabriel in particular aware that she never liked him in the first place, making him work in the garden while the girls were invited inside, it places a strain on their dynamic, Gabriel drinking and Emma sleepwalking but now in a position where she has a measure of independence from Gabriel who had previously been accustomed to issuing commands though both Emma and Celeste were equally accustomed to just ignoring him.
The feature debut of writer and director Nicholas Bain, Voice of Shadows benefits from its Minnesota locations, Milda’s house and Father John’s airy church with its rows of empty pews, but the underdeveloped ideas are weighted down by long takes from a static camera, the actors waiting for something to happen, Gabriel the only character of interest to survive past the midpoint, caught between the trauma of his past and the crisis of the present and tortured by the calls from the dead even though he has torn the telephone cable from the wall.
Inevitably becoming a by-the-numbers possession story, it is hampered by awkward narrative necessities; a murdered priest does not prompt a call to the police, a character wakes in the morning only for it to be night only minutes later with nothing achieved between, the flames of Gabriel’s final act flaming torch quite obviously added in post-production, generating neither smoke nor heat and never moving as they should as the torch is carried through the house.
Voice of Shadows will be available on digital download from Tuesday 17th September
