House of Voices is a film that desperately wishes it could be The Others. With its secluded countryside house, muted colours and supernatural themes House of Voices, or, to use its original French title, Saint Ange, owes a great debt to Alejandro Amenábar's chilling work of suspense horror but unfortunately conveys few of its strengths.

The story revolves around an orphanage, the Saint Ange of the French title, which has recently been decomissioned. Anna (Virginie Ledoyen) arrives just as the last group of children are being herded out, tasked with cleaning the place up prior to it being sold. With the headmistress, Madame Francard (Catriona MacColl), gone, Anna finds herself in the company of only two people: the brusque but kindly cook Helenka (Dorina Lazar), and Judith (Lou Doillon), a young woman who appears to be trapped in a perpetual state of childhood. Anna settles into her new role, but she has a secret: her previous employer assaulted and raped her, leaving her pregnant - a fact that she is desperate to hide, through the bandaging of her stomach. As she explores the house, she becomes aware of ghostly voices - voices that seemingly only she and the apparently insane Judith can hear. Is Anna mad, or does the orphanage house a terrible secret?

It's clear that first-time writer/director Pascal Laugier has something of an affinity with the Italian genre movies of the 1970s and 80s. Laugier, who previously helmed the sprawling three-hour documentary on Brotherhood of the Wolf (whose director, Christophe Gans, is one of this film's producers), makes several conscious attempts to ape the visuals of the likes of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, with the lengthy shots of gloom-stricken, languishing corridors and brooding close-ups of its star's eyes and forehead looking like they stepped straight out of Profondo Rosso and Seven Notes in Black, respectively. The casting, too, suggests a filmmaker well-versed in Spaghetti horror, with Fulci regular Catriona MacColl and Lou Doillon, daughter of Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye star Jane Birkin, occupying prominent roles. At one point, Argento's regular composer Claudio Simonetti was also attached to the project, although Laugier reportedly dismissed him after being unhappy with the musician's output.


For all its grand ambitions, however, House of Voices never manages to be anything more than a shadow of its forefathers. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: for the most part, this film is Boring with a capital "B". I understand that horror films don't have to be non-stop blood-letting orgies, and some might consider this sedately paced affair a welcome antidote to the formulaic slashers that have been doing the rounds of late, but the problem is that nothing much actually happens here. It runs for a shade over an hour and a half, but feels significantly longer. A great deal of time is spent with nothing much happening, and unlike The Others the slow pacing fails to add any tension. Laugier throws in too many disparate elements, such as Anna's pregnancy and the wounds on her back, which simply consume screen time without adding anything to the way the plot unfolds.

For all its faults, though, the film does have a few strengths, and in my opinion it is far from the disaster that the swathe of 1/10 reviews on the Internet Movie Database make it out to be. Virginie Ledoyen, who has seemingly been the target of a number of smear campaigns at the hands of the French tabloids, does pretty well despite having very little material to work with. The film is not exactly dialogue-heavy, but she conveys a lot with just her eyes and facial expressions. Most English-speaking audiences know her for her role in The Beach, but following that film she seems to have more or less vanished from the public eye outside France, making a number of poor choices in movie roles. As the juvenile Judith, Lou Doillon is quite effective, although her character does grate after a while. Catroina MacColl and Dorina Lazar also make the most of their ambiguous and underdeveloped roles. The film is also very nicely shot, with Laugier showing remarkable competence for someone who had never directed a feature length movie before, and meaning that even in its most uninvolving moments it remains nice to look at. Its failings are almost entirely related to the script, making House of Voices a technically proficient but ultimately unfulfilling endeavour.


DVD Presentation

The 2.39:1 anamorphic transfer is pretty good, but exhibits traits that are becoming all too common for DVD releases these days. The colours and contrast can't be faulted, and there is little, if anything, in the way of obvious compression artefacts. However, a significant amount of low-pass filtering destroys pretty much any fine detail in the wide shots, and the tell-tale signs of edge enhancement point to a transfer that has been subjected to a high degree of digital manipulation. This sort of image is pretty much the norm for releases from major studios these days, and it strikes me as quite ironic that, as technology has improved, the overall quality of DVD transfers has actually declined. At least the close-ups, which are fairly prominent in this title, partially make up for the low definition of the wider shots.

The only audio track present is an English Dolby Digital 5.1 affair. This might seem somewhat alarming given that the film is French in origin, but an inspection of the actors' lip movements gives the impression that it was shot in a hodgepodge of English and French, with most of the main characters speaking English but a number of them clearly post-dubbed. Other incidental characters, such as the children in the pre-credits sequence, were clearly not speaking English. Confusing matters further is the fact that the deleted scenes presented on the disc (see below) are in French, with the dialogue seeming to synchronise with the actors' lip movements. This makes me wonder if the film was in fact shot twice, once in English and once in French, to provide a "best" version for both markets. This might seem a little implausible, but I really can't think of any other explanation for this bizarre discrepancy. For what it's worth, the English audio track is a solid affair, with deep, punchy bass and crystal clear dialogue. Some imaginative use of the surrounds is also made, with thunderclaps and ghostly whispers emanating from multiple speakers.

English, French and Spanish subtitles are included for the film, while the extras are subtitled in Enlgish and Spanish.


Extras

The extras are rather limited in quantity, but the contents actually prove to be fairly substantial. Around 20 minutes' worth of deleted scenes are included, most of them merely expanding on material that made it into the final cut, but some of them helping to flesh out the character of Anna in subtle ways.

A 53-minute "making-of" feature provides a "fly on the wall" look at the production of the film. The material may tend to become a bit redundant after a while, as much of the footage is comprised simply of seeing various scenes being set up and performed, but there is some interesting material on offer here, including a look at the application of the extremely convincing prosthetic designed to make Ledoyen appear pregnant, as well as multiple takes of various members of the cast and crew trying (unsuccessfully) to break a mirror for one of the film's key scenes. Once again, we see the actors reading their lines in French, lending further credence to my theory that the dialogue scenes were in fact shot twice. In this documentary, material that is spoken in any language other than French is presented with burned-in French subtitles.

When you insert the disc, skippable trailers for My Summer of Love, Cry Wolf and Land of the Dead also play.


Overall

Competently shot and acted but ultimately unsatisfying, Universal have given House of Voices a decent if imperfect presentation on DVD, coupled with some solid bonus materials. While it would have been nice to have had the French version of the film as well, the apparent dual nature of the production of the dialogue scenes would probably have made this difficult. Let's hope Virginie Ledoyen gets attached to a half-decent project some time soon, because judging by her efforts here she has it in her to be a fine actor.

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