Grief is a messy experience, one that reveals itself in behavior that’s alternately volatile, depressive, withdrawn or anxious, and the way it reshapes our perception of both the past and the present is uniquely subjective. It’s never as neat or as tidy as anything in Voice from the Stone, a supernatural chiller from director Eric D. Howell that centers on a young child struggling with the untimely death of his mother. The film, set on a countryside Italian manor in the 1950s, expresses feelings of loss and anguish in picturesque tableaus: foggy forest trails, ancient mausoleums and dark, shadowy corridors are elegantly if painstakingly framed, and there’s no confusing the very specific mood conjured up Howell and cinematographer Peter Simonite. If style was all that mattered (and for some people, it is all that matters), then Voice from the Stone hits every note perfectly, but as Howell peels back the layers of his story and digs deeper into the psychology of his characters, the baroque visual flourishes fail to account for the lack of emotional depth.
Verena (Emilia Clarke) is a renowned British children’s nurse who arrives at the massive estate of nine-year-old Jakob (Edward George Dring), where he lives with his father, Klaus (Marton Csokas). The place belongs to Jakob’s late mother, Malvina (Caterina Murino), whose ancestors have occupied the home and its surrounding acres for generations. The boy hasn’t uttered a word to anyone since his mother died, and it’s up to Verena to lift him out of his depression. Over time, she discovers that Jakob believes he can hear his mother talking through the manor’s stone walls, and he refuses to speak in fear of driving her away. The story riffs on Hitchcock’s Rebecca and, eventually, Vertigo, as Verena, by either circumstantial behavior or supernatural influence, begins to assume the role of Malvina. Howell is slow to reveal which, focusing instead on Verena’s transition from a polite houseguest to surrogate mother for Jakob and willing object of Klaus’s obsession, which fuels his artistic ambition. In the film’s most scintillating and psychologically tense sequence, she helps him finish a sculpture of his late wife by posing in the nude, which of course ends in vigorous lovemaking, although the film’s depiction of both situations, blended together in a charged and explicit montage, make the provocative—if obvious—point that both acts are one and the same.
As melodrama, Voice from the Stone has a suitably Gothic tone, and there at least seems to be enough emotional tension between the principal characters to sustain the appropriate amount of suspense and splendiferousness. But by the third act, Howell dives headfirst into an all-out horror showdown, pounding home the story’s half-baked mythology surrounding Jakob’s lineage and the stone used to build the mansion. Between the gaping plot holes and characters who you thought were alive but are actually dead but might actually be alive but are probably dead, the shift in tone is distracting and abrupt, in large part because, for long stretches during the middle of the film, nothing particularly scary happens. Howell holds out on us and yet still manages to blow his load, fumbling along the tricky balance between complicated human behavior and cabalistic ghostly phenomena while failing to draw any connection—real or imagined—between the two. Grief is indeed at the center of it all, but it mostly stems from the director’s inability to draw blood from this stone of a film.
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