This is a very good looking film with wonderful actors but it fails to deliver any real emotion. I just didn't feel any real passion in the way the story was told. The story is about a young doctor named Sam Jones (Guy Pearce) who travels back to the home where he grew up at because his father died. One night he meets Ruby (Helena Bonham Carter) who tries to kill herself by jumping off a bridge and drowning but Sam saves her and brings her back to his place. After she wakes he discovers she has amnesia and he tries to help her get her memory back and in the process he gets to reflect on a horrible incident that took place when he was a teenager. The film uses flashbacks to see that young Sam (Lindley Joyner) and his handicapped girlfriend Silvy Lewis (Brooke Harmon) had a very special relationship and then she drowns one day tragically. This has haunted Sam up until the present and then discovers that Ruby is actually a reincarnated ghost of Silvy. Its not a horror film, far from it. But its then he gets a chance to come to grips with the past. Pearce and Carter do their best with this material and they're both such interesting performers and they keep the film from being a total bore. We understand right from the get go what's going to happen and the film relies on emotions and a sense of artistic posturing to tell its story. The title of the film comes from the T.S. Eliot poem "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock". This is a film that needed a sense of overpowering immediacy and passion like the Nicolas Roeg film "Don't Look Now". Unfortunately, this is just an excuse to go through the motions.
Review of Till Human Voices Wake Us
