By SHAWN MACOMBER
Starring Guillermo Blanco, Corrinne Mica and María José Vargas Agudelo
Written and directed by Nicholas Bain
Crystalsky Multimedia
Love, man.
It can make you do crazy things. Like, say, fly across the country to meet at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. Or stand below your beloved’s window holding a boombox blasting some Peter Gabriel. Or insist your crush use their time laid up in bed after an accident to finish that last romance novel they never had any intention of beginning. (Dirty bird!) Or even spend a few days in your girlfriend’s recently deceased aunt’s creepy rural gothic manor while the threatening phone calls, ghosts, creepy, cult-y vibes and dead bodies outnumber cuddles and kisses by about five to one.
Oh, you aren’t familiar with that last meet-cute? You will be after screening VOICE OF SHADOWS, a shadowy and somber, religiously tinged exploration of the power a possessed estate (family?) can wield over those so desperate for a happy ending that they’ll place themselves in quite obviously soul-corroding circumstances to get it.
Gabriel (Guillermo Blanco) seems to be putting his dark childhood past behind him: He’s in love with a lovely, charismatic woman (Emma, played by Corrinne Mica) with whom he has built a life big enough to encompass his baby sister Celeste (María José Vargas Agudelo) and vanquish any lingering residual generational trauma.
Are there are hints of malevolent entities along the edges?
Well, okay … yes. But these can mostly be ignored until Emma’s great aunt Milda (Jane Hammill) passes away and sketch-as-capital-H-Hell lawyer named Ernesto (Martin Harris) starts laying out the weird conditions for Emma to inherit the rural estate–demands that include answering weird, anonymous phone calls, chilling through bumps in the night and, at least temporarily, kicking Gabriel to the curb. When the trio refuse to leave the house–effectively no longer doing it for the nookie, but for the money–the dead and demonic take it as an open invitation to throw a housewarming party that would make Pazuzu green with envy. Soon Gabriel finds himself at war with supernatural forces not only for the soul of his sister and girlfriend, but his own very life.
Written and directed by Nicholas Bain, VOICE OF SHADOWS isn’t exactly what you’d expect from the creator of the graphic novel The Unicorn and The Fox, with its lush, luminous colors and grand fantastical renderings: This is a very earthy, corporeal film that sees its modest budget less as a handicap than a conduit towards verisimilitude. Terrifying though these apparitions are, they do not feel otherworldly, necessarily–truly us haunted by ourselves. And the nuanced, authentic performances, especially by the leads, only amplify this effect.
Are those butterflies roiling your belly? Or some little demonic cadaver-loving worms? VOICE OF SHADOWS suggests the distance between the two may be shorter than you suppose–and that the former may very well feed the latter in the wrong circumstances.
VOICE OF SHADOWS is currently streaming through most major platforms, including Prime Video.
