The Sounding (2017)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Crappy film

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The Sounding is a brave film about resistance: resistance to conformity, to conventionality, to the expectations of the dominant culture and its narratives about normality and sanity and the kinds of lives we're allowed to pursue without the cultural enforcers, including the medical establishment and the state, coming down to set us straight via medication and even incarceration. So long as we speak the exoburban language of consumption and self and reaction and generally behave, chances are good we'll be left alone. But, if, one day, we lose faith in conventional discourse and subvert it by beginning to speak . . . Shakespeare, well, all bets are off.Catherine Eaton is mesmerizing as Liv, a young woman who, on a windswept island off the Maine coast, has chosen to remain silent for years. Eventually, she begins to speak again, but in an English composed entirely of Shakespeare's words. That's when the assault on her freedom begins. She must be protected, mustn't she? Surely, she must be normalized, the cause of her anomalous behavior diagnosed, and a path to "recovery" prescribed and followed. Surely she must give up her resistance to those who would help her. Surely.Ms. Eaton both directs the film and delivers a masterful, haunting, and powerful performance as Liv. The cinematography is breathtaking — the Maine coast is difficult to get wrong, but its desolate, Novemberish beauty is a poignant setting for Liv's struggle to be free and live an authentic life as she imagines it. Eaton has written that the film is ultimately about "otherness" and its cost. It couldn't come at a more propitious moment than the present that is witnessing a demonization of the foreign Other who presents such a vulnerable scapegoat onto which too many Americans are projecting their anxiety and insecurity. It will be a great benefit for this film to be available for all Americans to see and think about.

The Sounding is the kind of film you see every few years that comes out of the indie circuit and rekindles your belief in storytelling and the power of human connections. Beautifully shot, acted, and realized. These are filmmaker we'll hear from in the future. And Catherine Eaton is already a movie star.

This film is beautifully written, acted and shot. There is so much heart, so much grace and so much humanity in this film that it is impossible not to be moved. Watching this film I was transported to a world where love, humor, friendship, and poetry make life possible. It also made me laugh and weep while reveling in the beauty of the cinematography.

This is a fascinating and very well made movie. A women decides not to talk, despite being mentally capable, and after her grandfather dies will only talk in Shakespearean quotations. It's a movie that asks the fundamental question of communication and let's you answer it. With a tremendous supporting performance from Harris Yulin, the grandfather, a well designed and written screenplay by newcomers Catherine Eaton and Bryan Delaney and a, quite simply, intriguing plot, this movie certainly succeeds. While it needs a little polish, as it drags in spots in the beginning and doesn't nail its ending, it is already very good nonetheless.