THE VOICES (2014)
I came across THE VOICES while browsing the DVDs at my local public library a few years ago. I was surprised to see a Ryan Reynolds film that I couldn’t remember ever seeing or hearing anything about. Released in 2014, not long after Reynolds’ turn in the disappointing R.I.P.D., it’s an overlooked gem. Directed by Marjane Satrapi (PERSEPOLIS) and written by Michael R. Perry (PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2), to sum up THE VOICES in one sentence: it’s a dark comedy about a guy with a talking cat and dog who has a difficult time finding the right woman.
Ryan Reynolds plays Jerry, the strange and slightly pathetic guy from shipping and delivery at the Milton factory. From the beginning we get hints that there is something not quite right about Jerry. We soon find out he sees a court appointed therapist and is supposed to be taking medication. One thing I really enjoyed about the movie was the setup and reveal. We know things are not as they seem, and it goes on just long enough to keep us hooked. We also don’t end up feeling deceived when things take a strange turn…and it gets very strange.
Of course, one of my other favorite things about the movie is Ryan Reynolds. Although it’s a dark comedy we don’t see the usual sarcastic wisecracking character that we are so used to him playing. In fact, Jerry is such a sympathetic character that even after he starts killing people you still feel bad for him. You might even find yourself justifying the murders (at least I did).
Fiona (Gemma Arterton), his first victim, is the self-proclaimed office hottie he’s been crushing on. She agreed to go on a date with him, then stood him up. Even after that, he offers her a ride when she’s stuck in the rain. So when she runs from him for no good reason and he accidentally stabs her, you start thinking “well whose fault was it, really?”. It’s a bit of a slippery slope soon after. While he’d changed his mind to not murder Lisa (Anna Kendrick), she went into his apartment and got all freaked out and he didn’t have a choice, really. I felt even worse about her death because they’d hit it off so well. Lisa seemed to be just the right amount of clueless and awkward that made her a perfect match for Jerry. Kendrick seems to have a knack for those kinds of roles and excels with her perky, quirky, and fun performances.
Reynolds also provides the voices for four other characters including Jerry’s cat and dog, Mr. Whiskers and Bosco (respectively). Mr. Whiskers provides sarcasm and is mostly a dick.
He’s the devil on Jerry’s shoulder, insulting the protagonist and encouraging him to kill more people. Meanwhile Bosco is the angel, telling Jerry he’s a good boy and that he should do the right thing.
Mr. Whiskers also calls Jerry out when the less-than-mild-mannered man tries to deny the truth, like pointing out that Jerry wouldn’t have brought a knife with him to see Fiona if he didn’t intend on killing her.
Whiskers is the reality check that Jerry needs, while Bosco mostly tells him what he wants to hear. Although even Bosco has his limits and, in a funny moment, tells Jerry that the line between good and evil has been officially crossed.
A lot of the movie’s humor comes from the interactions between the three characters (which are all actually Jerry). In reality, the whole movie he’s pretty much just talking and arguing with himself. This is carried off deftly through Reynolds’ performance(s) and Satrapi’s direction to make it feel like different characters interacting, yet all of the same cloth. Which is in line with absolute absurdity of everything else in THE VOICES that makes it so comical.
Jerry chopping his victims’ bodies into pieces would be grotesque in other films, but following up by putting all those pieces into tidy, little food storage containers is just odd enough to make it darkly hilarious. All those pieces except for the heads, those he keeps in the refrigerator…where they also talk to him. Fiona’s head asking for a friend is what originally led Jerry to seek Lisa out with the intention of killing her before that all became a mess.
THE VOICES’ greatest strength is that it keeps you guessing. We get a couple different views of things and you’re not always sure what’s real or not.
When we first see his apartment, it looks bright, clean, normal. But when he takes his medication, we see how it actually looks for the first time. It’s dark, dirty, and there are plastic wrapped boxes everywhere.
It changes through the movie as we see it through other points of view, with the mundane and fantastic muddled and interchanged to make it hard to discern. One of the early scenes is of the office picnic where everybody dances in a conga line, very bright and happy, with Jerry and Fiona dancing while butterflies hover around her head. I initially assumed the butterflies and two of them dancing was part of his fantasy. But looking back later, makes you want to question the whole thing as each voice added becomes another unreliable narrator telling the story.
