The Voices

Filmmakers have resorted to all kinds of methods to portray schizophrenia-type mental illnesses on screen, from Fights Club’s “your best friend wasn't real” final act revelation to Lars And Real Girl’s conceit of a blow-up doll seemingly being taken for a real living partner by the protagonist. No matter what the gimmick, going for a black comedy approach when the mentally-damaged main character is also a serial killer demands a certain finesse in the scripting, in order to avoid being either crass or over familiar. Writer/director Marjane Satrapi, the creator of graphic novel Persepolis which was adapted into a 2006 movie that she co-directed, can’t quite make The Voices walk that tightrope.

The gimmick here is actually a two-hander; the lovable Ryan Reynolds is the unstable, off-his-meds killer, and his schizophrenia manifests here on screen in the form of both his pet cat and dog apparently possessing the ability to talk to him. Reynolds plays thirty-something Jerry, introduced to us as a pink boiler-suit wearing employee in the shipping department of the Milton Bathtub Factory - a twee sitcom-ish setting immediately redolent of Wes Anderson movies, with a twinkly score and plenty of vivid colours to boot. Jerry himself seems to be a cheery, if somewhat withdrawn and awkward type, nervy around ‘hot english’ employee Fiona (Gemma Arterton, awkwardly hamming up her Brit accent) and ignorant of the attentions of feisty clerk Lisa (Anna Kendrick, lively but wasted).

Jerry is soon seen shuffling into his psychiatrist’s office, skittishly agreeing to not miss any more of his medication, so our suspicions are raised that all might not be well. Still, nothing too freaky has occurred so far. Then Jerry goes home and… starts talking to his pets as if its the most natural thing since in the world, and it is clear that he is, yes, very probably off his medication. The pets are loyal dog Bosco (voiced with a note of morose, world-weariness by Reynolds himself), and his cat, Mr Whiskers, who for some reason is a pissy-sounding Scot (the voice of Reynolds again). The animal’s mouths are CGI-animated in a quite basic fashion, but that makes sense, as there is never any doubt that what we are seeing is in Jerry’s mind. What Bosco and Mr Whiskers are, presumably, are reflections of the collision between Jerry’s schizophrenic impulses and his moral compass.

Jerry ends up stuck in a battle with his own mind, which is spilling out into warped representations of these animals. The pets seem to be real, it is only Jerry who can hear their voices. Mr Whiskers, as befitting a cat, is a vicious bastard who is not one for couch therapy or compassion, his first words whenever Jerry walks in the door are either “food” or a “fuck you”. Providing most of the comic relief in the film (we’ve been primed for years by lolcats to find crude felines funny), Mr Whiskers seems to be some manifestation of the dark side of Jerry’s mental condition, urging him to embrace his baser instincts and avoid being such a sap. The dour Bosco, in contrast, has some earnest homilies to dish out, but when Jerry accidentally - or maybe not so accidentally - kills a fellow employee, Mr Whiskers starts to gain the upper hand.

Reynolds has been tapped before for his ability to play characters operating on a different radio frequency to the rest of the world whilst still being somehow charming - it is one of the reasons he is the fans choice to play the deranged superpower mercenary Deadpool in the upcoming Marvel movie of the same name. He certainly commits to the role, putting the energy in all the way through a series of increasingly gory and weird occurrences, whether that be engaging in GCSE-level philosophical debates with a moggy or hacking up his victims and carefully packing their mushed parts in over 30 stacked tupperware cases (one of the film’s gorier visual highlights). But the film he is in can’t seem to fully decide where it is going.

Once it is clear that much of what we are seeing is in Jerry’s head - which allows for some of that Wes Anderson style quirk - it seems that there are so many intriguing ways things could play things out. But Satrapi never goes for the jugular, and there is nothing really very stylistically inventive about the way she portrays how Jerry sees the world, or how he kills. He stacks heads in the fridge and has the occasional chat with them, he sees one as a glowing angel with wings, and even imagines himself in kitsch song and dance routines at times. These flourishes veer between charming and gross, but we’ve seen this all before in one form or another.

Though the film does make a stab at creating a blended atmosphere of sadness, black comedy and bloody murder, it ends up caught between the proverbial stools, and a film about voices in the head surely should have a better script at any rate. For sure, seeing a cat wax lyrical about how “fookin” good it is to clear your head with a good stabbing is quite funny, but the debate for Jerry’s soul never really becomes that complex or interesting. Partly thats because it is so once-sided; poor old Bosco never really has much to say, so we never feel Jerry is struggling. And Mr Whisker’s insistence that Jerry is denying some long-buried urge to kill isn't really reflected on screen: Jerry just seems to be bumbling around, killing almost in a panic. We never feel he is on the edge, and when he does start lashing out later in something that does seem like uncontainable rage, it doesn’t feel earned or the result of a long and losing battle. No matter what Jerry does, it is never really surprising, and maybe that’s the real problem.

Occasionally stylish, always weird, but only fitfully funny and scary, The Voices is a curiosity of film for sure but its just hard to know what exactly it is supposed to be shooting for.