Robert Parent: Director
Review: Voice of Reason
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Voice of Reason
Director: Robert Parent
Release: 2007
Along that curvature, "Voice of Reason" not only plays with audiences' expectations of who is the protagonist, and what they are up to, but it posits the scenario-if we interrogate our heroine, will she hold up to scrutiny?
Tracy Young (Kortney Adams) and her two friends are hiking. They penetrate a wooded trail so deeply that the trees open again and spit them into an abandoned hospital campus. Outside, the silent sun bakes cracked and forgotten rooftops. Inside, a decaying labyrinth of rooms and tunnels await.
Something goes drastically wrong in the remains of the buildings Tracy, Todd, and Stephanie (Dennis Lemoine and Leah Polacco) explore.
Separated, panicked, and ultimately assaulted by a presence in the pitch black of utility tunnels, Tracy's next conscious moment occurs in another sort of hospital altogether.
A single lens in the wall of the therapy room to which she is brought is accompanied by an inquisitor's voice, thumbing the index of her memory.
The implications of the questions grow darker.
What has happened to Tracy and her companions is the pin around which "Voice of Reason" turns.
Along with the surreal nature of her treatment, Tracy slips into a world increasingly unrelated to the life she led before the hike.
Escape from the hospital in which she is held becomes an unrelenting sequence of shattered mirrors, each revealing another version of her fate more violent and overtly supernatural than the last.
The events in the tunnel of the abandoned hospital replay in various ways, until the veil of her situation lifts and the nature of her incarceration is at once writ large and left abstract.
Herein lies the component of "Voice of Reason" that Parent perfects.
As far as a psychological story, Parent delivers multifaceted and challenging moments-a study in perception and perspective that satisfies in that it does not release the audience with all loose ends tied.
"Voice of Reason" is a puzzle, as much a puzzle about what the viewer needs of the characters as it is a twist-ending thriller.
In a conventional structure Tracy would be the trustworthy narrator, and her audience the filmic Other floating near her, observing the darkening world she inhabits alongside. But this turns out to be a mistake.
Not only is Parent's audience's trust in Tracy eroded, Parent places viewers before the eye of the lens, and its role as Other becomes complicity in her frame of mind.
Interrogated directly, and answered through avatar Tracy Young the iris of the monitor widens in disbelief. The audience is forced to decide: With her or not?
Does Tracy's audience point a finger and claim, "No, it was all her?" Or does the audience succumb to the interrogation and admit it cannot know Tracy's role in those final moments beneath the abandoned hospital?
In the end, when the literal lens pulls back to reveal Tracy's final destination, the audience is still not entirely off the hook.
What parts of what it sees is transcribed as actual? Which pieces of "Voice of Reason" are pure hallucination? Which are supernatural?
Kubrickian in influence, and in execution, "Voice of Reason" works as hard as its masterpiece older cousins-"The Shining," for example-to demand viewers question their protagonist.
While Tracy is no Jack Torrance, she is part of the problem for which she demands a solution.
These are the ways in which Parent's film works well.
The story is saddled, however, with difficult production choices.
The robed and masked force that pursues and perpetuates Tracy's condition disrupts the otherwise textured and atmospheric layers.
Parent opts too soon, and then too often, for a palpable genre significator, a two-legged and weapon-wielding villain that stands in for evil/death/insanity.
Parent is working with too many good ideas for the slasher film mechanism to play such a dominant role at midpoint in the story.
When Parent sticks to the chambers and whispers of the dilapidated hospital, or the bright lights and animated monitor, "Voice of Reason" slowly ratchets the tension of the mystery toward climax.
When the blade-bearing reaper appears, however-whatever its pseudo-Freudian dream meaning-"Voice of Reason" strains its seams.
However, for most of the movie's length, Parent carves an interesting-at times compelling-horror story out of the deteriorating rooms of Dever Rehabilitation Center in Taunton, Mass.
Nor is it easy to shake the notion that dilating lens is looking right back into the audience's world, demanding Tracy's words be questioned and our relationship with her on the screen be ultimately questioned.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
