JP Nunez
In real life, I’m not a fan of cults or evil entities, but if you give me a movie about either of those things, I’ll happily eat it up. And if a film includes both of them, I’ll be chomping at the bit to see it, so when I first heard about Voice of Shadows, the movie immediately caught my attention. It promised to tell a stirring tale about a devout Catholic who finds himself in a spiritual battle with a malicious cult, and that sounded right up my alley. I requested a screener as soon as I got the chance, and I couldn’t wait to see what supernatural chills and thrills it had in store.
Voice of Shadows was written and directed by Nicholas Bain, and it stars Guillermo Blanco, Corrinne Mica, Bee Vang, Michael Paul Levin, and Martin Harris. In the film, Gabriel and Emma are a young couple struggling to make ends meet, but they get a bittersweet boon when Emma’s aunt, an elderly woman named Milda, passes away unexpectedly. She leaves her house and property to her niece, and once Emma and Gabriel learn about their inheritance, they quickly move in.
At first, it seems like the solution they’ve been looking for, and they even bring Gabriel’s sister, Celeste, with them. But as you can probably guess, this is really an anti-blessing in disguise. Almost immediately, Emma and Celeste begin to exhibit some very odd behavior, and it soon becomes clear that Milda didn’t bequeath her house to her niece out of love. She was part of a dark cult, and this group has nefarious plans for our three main characters.
If you’re a hardcore horror fan, that plot synopsis might sound a bit familiar. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, but unfortunately, Voice of Shadows isn’t nearly as effective. In fact, this movie doesn’t just pale in comparison to Aster’s incredible feature debut. It’s simply not very good in its own right.
For starters, the acting in this film is hit or miss, and that’s putting it mildly. Sure, there are moments where the characters are convincing, but for the most part, this entire cast is unbelievable, and I mean that literally. They feel like actors running through a script rather than real people undergoing real experiences, so I simply couldn’t buy into them or their story.
The only exception is Jane Hammill, the actress who plays Milda, but unsurprisingly, she doesn’t get much screen time. Her character dies pretty early in Voice of Shadows, so while she does pop up again a few times after that (but I won’t tell you how!), she’s simply not in the movie enough to make a difference.
Along similar lines, the script in Voice of Shadows is also rather shoddy. Much of the dialogue in this movie feels stilted and unnatural, and there are a couple of utterly ridiculous moments that bear absolutely no resemblance to real human behavior. To take just one example, there’s a scene where Emma wants to explore the house’s basement, but Gabriel insists that she shouldn’t. And when she asks why he’s afraid of basements, he says it’s because he had to bury his mother and her murderer in a basement. I cringed just writing that, so you can imagine how I felt watching it on screen.
In fact, the story as a whole is pretty subpar. Almost from the moment you meet the executor of Milda’s will, you know how this is all going to play out, and from then on, the film has absolutely zero surprises. Granted, it does try to incorporate a few twists and turns into its third act, but none of them are even remotely effective. For instance, there’s a deus ex machina that’s also blandly predictable, and while that may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, Voice of Shadows somehow manages to pull it off.
Last but not least, we have to talk about the horror. Like most supernatural horror films, this one features a mix of jump scares, horrific imagery, and tense scenes of people slowly walking in the dark, but much like the performances, almost none of it works. Other than two brief moments, all the scares in Voice of Shadows fall completely flat, and if you’ve read my reviews before, you might be able to guess why.
On paper, all the ingredients for at least a few more genuinely eerie scenes appear to be there. The score is what you’d expect from atmospheric horror, the lighting (or lack thereof) is fine, and the characters move at the slow pace you’d expect. But the film lacks one key ingredient: good characters.
I’ve said it about a million times before, and I’ll probably say it a million times again, but horror is generally only as effective as the people going through it. Sure, like every rule of thumb, there are a couple of exceptions here and there, but by and large, if you’re not scared for the characters, you won’t be scared of the horror.
And that’s exactly what happens here. Not only was I completely apathetic about Emma, Gabriel, and Celeste, but I didn’t even believe they were real. They feel like actors walking through sets and reading pre-written lines (and poorly written ones, at that), and that ruins the entire experience. It kills both the story and the horror, and in a movie like this, that’s a fatal flaw.
So if you’re looking for some good new horror to watch, I’m sad to report that you won’t find it here. Aside from a few isolated moments, nothing about Voice of Shadows works. The acting is bad, the dialogue and story are subpar, and the scares are ineffective. To summarise, this is one of the worst films I’ve seen all year, so I recommend staying as far away from it as possible.
Voice of Shadows is set to hit VOD on September 17.
