House of Voices (2004)

Sadly Over-hyped

Please don't spend money on this.

Brilliant and touching

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is an artsy flick made in a typical French – that is, sluggish – style. If you are in for anything resembling a horror movie, or simply a structured and reasonable movie, you'll hate this crap from the depths of your soul. However, if you are interested in modern arts – that is, mental masturbation – you might be gripped by the beautiful cinematography, the suggestive music, the hazy symbolism and the plot's patent absurdity.After some effort at piecing the puzzle, you'll unveil the dull, repulsive humanist ideology conveyed by the director in the form of a condemnation of both Nazi human experimenting and French vilification of the bastard children fathered by German occupants after the second world war.

I think that this movie was very good, a little confusing at times, but overall well done. I enjoy a orphanage haunting and this one sat me down, and made my mind wander. The main character made me love her in a peculiar way, mysterious, yet beautiful. Her willingness to find the truth instead of cower and run sank me deeper and deeper. I say give it a go, and be willing to venture into a dark place full of odd discoveries. Don't compare it to The Others, or The Orphanage. It is its own film, with a neat kind of scary journey. The structure of the house is done really well and just made me want to venture in and get lost. I think the director did an amazing job, well enough for me to come on here and write a review.

I love haunted house movies like some horror fans love a good slasher movie. I'm not talking about George C. Scott tooling around an empty house for some dead kid's bouncy ball. I'm talking about seriously creepy haunted house flicks where the house is possessed by stuff that would make Lovecraft rise from the grave. This film is nice to look at but it breaks the first rule of haunted house movies: it's ridiculously boring. Even after drinking a flagon of Mountain Dew, I had to struggle to keep my eyelids on the out and open mode during several stretches of this film. When I say nothing happens in this film, I really mean nothing happens at all. Some Natalie Portman lookalike babe who's hiding her pregnancy ends up at an orphanage in the 50's to work as a cleaning lady while the place undergoes renovations. Everyone vacates the premises except for the plump, matronly cooking wench and one orphan who's been there just a tad too long and does a bang-up Courtney Love impression. Apparently, the place is haunted but you wouldn't know that from watching the damn movie. A good haunted house movie doesn't rely on a few boo-jumps but more on solid atmosphere and creepy settings. I guess the director didn't get that memo. It's not awful, just extremely dull. That's a shame, because the house and the actors are there, but the story isn't. Toward the end of the film, the main character discovers what's really going on and what follows is so out of left field and jarringly gauche for the movie, I was checking to make sure I hadn't fallen asleep and accidentally started another movie while I was snoozing. If you want something playing in the background while you have a Saturday afternoon nap, go ahead and put House of Voices on. You'll probably have a boring dream about being a hot housekeeper in France.

First of all, don't watch it unless you want to waste one and a half hours of your life.Actually, the first 3-minute-long scene is pretty OK, you might even think it's a good movie but it's misleading. This movie is boring, pathetic, illogical and has no story at all. The movie should rather be called "the adventures of a pregnant lady trying to hide the obvious, a weird girl suffering from mental retardation and one of those everyone-knows-they-had-done-something-really-bad-before kind of old lady", though it obviously wouldn't be as appealing as a good sounding french name but at least it would've kept thousands of confiding people from watching this bullshit.Also, I wonder where the advertized twist ending is. I must have missed it (maybe I fell asleep?) because I only remember the most obvious ending possible. I really couldn't hold my laughter back (nor did I want to) when the girl started to give birth with all the zombie kids standing around her watching. Seriously, it MUST have been a joke.The acting wasn't that bad (it could've been worse) but the horrible and hardly understandable french (romanian?) accent ruined it.One more thing I need to mention about this movie is the music. It was really good only not for a horror movie packed with Really Dramatic Moments. However, it would go pretty good with a comedy.All in all, this movie is just awful, and not even that "laughing my butt off" kind of awful. I don't recommend it for anyone.