Voice of Shadows (2023) - Horror Film Review

I had a week off of my blog last week so that I could go on a mini-vacation with my best friend. I confess that lately I have been feeling a bit of burnout with this site in recent months, but the break helped, so I am back to a full five posts for this week (actually turned out just to be the four!). Voice of Shadows is the feature length directorial debut of Nicholas Bain, who wrote this also. It takes a typical idea and adds a surreal twist to it, something that kept my attention, even if I can't say I thought much of the characters here.

Emma (Corrinne Mica) her boyfriend Gabriel (Guillermo Blanco) and his sister Celeste (María José Vargas Agudelo) often spend time at the mansion of an elderly and eccentric lady named Milda (Jane Hammill) who thinks of the two girls like nieces. This is somewhere Gabriel hates going, due to Milda appearing to detest the man. With it implied the trio are in desperate money troubles they once again visit the old lady. The next day, Emma receives a phone call saying that Milda had passed away suddenly, and she comes to learn from an equally eccentric friend of the old lady - Ernesto (Martin Harris), that Milda left her the entire estate in her will. Being in so much financial trouble, the trio decide to move in, but Ernesto reveals some bizarre conditions of Emma getting the estate, such as Gabriel being forbidden to be there. They ignore this, but Gabriel soon begins to suspect all is not right, with Emma and Celeste acting very strangely, and a feel of a supernatural or demonic presence in the house.

Voice of Shadows is at least surreal, but that wasn't enough to save it for me from some less than fantastic characters. After an almost amusing prologue in which Gabriel is confessing his tragic backstory in a confession booth before realising there isn't a priest listening to him, the film has a mini-reset. Gabriel was a terrible character, he was set out as the protagonist but I thought he was a bit of a pathetic wet blanket. Emma and his sister pay him so little attention that in the early part of watching this I thought that he might be dead, with a late film reveal of this fact. No though, it seems that everyone hates him. It becomes a bit of a running joke with nearly every character either ignoring him or being mean to him, even the nice ones often have a feeling of taking the mick out of him, such as his creepy next door neighbour Birdie (Kevin Lokey).

Gabriel is very Catholic, so there is a feeling of a battle between good and evil going on, with it revealed Milda appeared to be into some sort of demonic worship, perhaps the reason she disliked him so much during life. He might be Catholic, but the church also appear to hate him, such as the empty booth in the prologue as well as several later scenes where he keeps getting told to go away each time he arrives at the church! Gabriel is also very annoying, it was amusing how much his girlfriend appears to hate him, with many different overhead shots of the two sleeping in bed quite distant from one another. I couldn't tell if he was meant to come across as a good guy, but with his super serious backstory and his ineffective bossy persona he was hard to take seriously.
There were only a small cast of characters, and they were not all bad to be fair. I thought Celeste was great, not so much Emma who came across as a bit bland and lifeless, then there was Ernesto who I did enjoy watching on screen with his bizarre tweed suit.

The horror here mainly comes from the feeling of paranoia and wrongness about both the mansion and the people revolving around it. I thought some of the investigation scenes were saved by strong props, but things such as slamming doors and rocking chairs moving on their own seemed a bit tired. Then there are the jump scare moments of figures with black eyes bursting out the darkness, not sure if they were meant to make the viewer jump also but those parts came across as cheesy. Now there was one legitimately great scene in the third act revolving Celeste, but it did only last around a minute, still it shows that there are some parts of Voice of Shadows that did shine strong. I would also say that the reveals of the antagonist's backstory was interesting when you stop to really think about it and what is suggested just by characters telling others the details rather than showing anything.

Voice of Shadows fell into the middle for me when it came to enjoyment. It wasn't a terrible film nor was it a boring film, I had no trouble watching this, but I had some bemusement with the strange choice of protagonist. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there was a feeling of round pegs being smashed into square holes with some aspects of this movie, with things not quite coming together as I had hoped. Voice of Shadows is to be released in North America on digital and streaming platforms on September 17th from Scatena & Rosner Films.

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