Sound of My Voice: The Basement Time-Traveller Cult

Two documentary filmmakers are driven to a house, blindfolded, made to shower, dressed in hospital gowns and taught an elaborate handshake before being led down into a basement. Waiting there, hooked to an oxygen line, pale as paper, is a woman named Maggie. She tells them she was born in 2054. She says the water and the air of this decade make her ill. She asks them to trust her.

Sound of My Voice runs about eighty-five minutes, was made for a sum its own producers have described in the tens of thousands of dollars, and premiered at Sundance in 2011. It is one of the most efficient science-fiction films of the century, and its efficiency comes from a decision most films in its position would never risk: it refuses, from first frame to last, to tell you whether the science fiction is happening.

The couple with the camera

Peter Aitken (Christopher Denham) and Lorna Michaelson (Nicole Vicius) are a couple, and they have infiltrated the group to expose it. Peter is a substitute teacher with a documentary and a mission; Lorna is the daughter of money and a former addict, and she is along partly for him. Their plan is straightforward: get inside, record Maggie, prove she is a fraud, publish.

The film understands the flaw in that plan immediately, and it is the flaw in every undercover story ever filmed. To infiltrate a group you must perform belonging, and performing belonging is indistinguishable, from the inside, from belonging. Peter kneels because the cover requires kneeling. Peter weeps in a session because the cover requires weeping. And somewhere in there the cover stops being a costume.

Brit Marling plays Maggie, and she co-wrote the film with its director, Zal Batmanglij. The performance is the reason the whole apparatus holds. Marling plays her without a single note of the usual cult-leader register — no charisma turned up to eleven, no messianic glow, no reptile coldness. Maggie is soft-spoken, tired, occasionally petty, frequently kind, and she cries. She asks people questions and appears to listen to the answers. The film’s most unsettling quality is that she is pleasant, and that everything she does could be explained equally well by sincerity or by an operator of extraordinary skill, and the film has no interest in helping you choose.

The mechanism

Here is the craft argument, and it is why this film lasts.

Batmanglij builds the whole thing out of a single tension: every scene in the basement admits exactly two readings, and both are complete. When Maggie describes the future — a civil war, scarcity, a world she has escaped backwards from — she gives details that are either memories or research. When she is challenged, her responses are either the reactions of a woman being disbelieved about her own life or the technique of someone who has anticipated the challenge. When she fails a test, the failure either exposes her or proves the testers’ bad faith. The screenplay never once tips.

The staging enforces it. The basement scenes are shot in close, warm, low light with the camera at seated height among the group, so the viewer occupies a chair in the circle. There is no exterior vantage — no cutaway to a control room, no shot of Maggie alone unmasking, none of the standard cinematic mercy that lets an audience know more than the characters. You are given precisely the information a member is given. And the film is structured in numbered chapters that announce their own segmentation, a formal cool that sits against the emotional heat of the sessions and keeps reminding you that this is being organised by someone with a plan, without ever specifying whether that someone is Maggie or the filmmakers.

The result is that the audience is put through the recruitment. You lean toward belief because the film gives you nothing to hold against it; then you catch yourself; then you are exactly where Peter is. It is a film about how belief is manufactured that manufactures belief in you to make the point, which is a considerably harder trick than the ambiguity it looks like from outside.

The ancestor

The obvious ancestor is The Man from Earth, Jerome Bixby’s one-room film in which a man announces to a room of colleagues that he is fourteen thousand years old and then simply answers questions for ninety minutes. That is the same machine: an unfalsifiable claimant, a hostile audience of sceptics, and a script that generates all its tension from the fact that no test exists which would settle the matter. Bixby’s version is a debate. Batmanglij’s version adds the thing that makes it frightening, which is a group — the moment the sceptics stop being a jury and start being a congregation.

Its more distant relative is the whole 1970s paranoia strain, where a documentary or an investigation is the frame and the investigator is the actual subject. And its immediate family sits in the same Sundance programme it played: Marling co-wrote and starred in Another Earth, which premiered at the same festival in the same January, and the two films together announced a specific proposition — that science fiction could be made for the price of a car, in domestic rooms, using one impossible premise and no effects budget, provided the premise cut close enough to a real wound.

Watch it beside Primer for the other end of the same argument. Shane Carruth built a time-travel film so specific it becomes opaque; Batmanglij built one so withholding it becomes a mirror. Both cost nothing. Both are about what a claim does to the people around it.

The case against

The documentary-filmmaker frame is the weakest element. Peter and Lorna’s project is thinly motivated, and the relationship between them is drawn in broad marital strokes to give the third act something to break. Christopher Denham has the harder job and does not always land it — Peter’s slide has to be legible without being announced, and there are stretches where it reads as a man being slow rather than a man being taken.

The subplot involving a child at the school where Peter teaches is the film’s most obvious machinery, visible as a device long before it becomes one. And the ending, which I will get to, is the sort of thing that either detonates the film or simply stops it, depending on your temperament. There is no third response and the film has no interest in engineering one.

The verdict, spoiler-free

Sound of My Voice is a small perfect object, and it is the film I would hand anyone who claims science fiction requires money. It costs nothing, it takes place almost entirely in one basement, its effects budget is an oxygen tank and a lamp, and it is more genuinely unsettling than most of the decade’s spaceships. Marling’s Maggie is one of the great screen constructions of the 2010s precisely because she declines every opportunity to be sinister.

It streams and circulates on disc, and it is short. Watch it cold, without reading anything else, which is advice I am aware is compromised by the existence of this paragraph. Then watch Another Earth from the same January and the same writer, and see the other half of a two-film argument about grief, guilt and the impossible thing in the room.

Spoilers below

The film’s cruellest sequence is the vomiting session. Maggie asks the group to eat a meal and then bring it back up in front of her — an act of collective humiliation that also functions, if you are keeping the two readings alive, as a genuine medical necessity for a woman whose system cannot process this era’s food. Batmanglij plays it long and grim, and it is the moment the film’s technique reveals its teeth: the scene is unbearable under either interpretation, and the two interpretations produce completely different films, and you are asked to sit through it without choosing.

The apple is the film’s other great trap. Maggie is challenged to prove herself, and one of the group produces a piece of evidence about her past — a photograph, a name, a history in this decade — and Maggie’s response is to deny it in a way that satisfies nobody and disproves nothing. The scene where she is exposed is also the scene where she is most sympathetic, and Marling plays it as a woman being called a liar about her own existence, which is precisely how a liar would play it.

Peter’s collapse is total and quiet. He is asked to bring Maggie a child — Abigail Pritchett, a pupil from his school, whom Maggie identifies as her own mother. The request is monstrous and Peter, by that point, is gone enough to consider it. Lorna, who came for him rather than for the group, has stayed sceptical throughout, which the film frames as its own kind of coldness.

Then the last scene. Peter delivers Abigail. A woman appears — a Department of Justice investigator who has been running Lorna, or running Peter, the film declines to clarify — and moves to arrest Maggie. And in the moment before it happens, Abigail makes a small private gesture toward Maggie, and Maggie returns it, and it is the handshake: the elaborate secret greeting the group has been performing all film, which Maggie has always said her mother taught her. Cut to black.

There is no explanation. If Abigail knows the handshake, Maggie is from 2054 and everything follows. If Abigail knows the handshake, Peter taught her, or Lorna did, or the group did, and the whole thing is a con closing perfectly. The film has spent eighty-five minutes withholding the answer and its final gesture is to withhold it harder — to hand you an image that is simultaneously the proof and the trick, and let you discover what you already believed by watching which one you saw. That is the most elegant last shot in low-budget science fiction, and its elegance is that it costs nothing at all.