Till Human Voices Wake Us is about a psychology professor who must return to his hometown to bury his father and meets a woman on the train ride home that he later sees on a stormy night. The present day scenes are juxtaposed with flashbacks of his adolescent relationships and how they shaped him into the stone like man that he is today. Which came first: Lost or Till Human Voices Wake Us? Lost, but who knows when they were both conceived. Like Stephen King writes in Lisey’s Story, “This was the pool where we all come to drink, the very cup of imagination, and so of course everyone saw it a little bit differently.”
Apparently there are two versions of Till Human Voices Wake Us: a chronological version, which was only available in Australia, and the one that I saw, which gives away a crucial plot twist in the initial flash backs and cuts out another crucial scene. Who thought that Americans don’t like good story telling? Till Human Voices Wake Us could be a good movie, but I’ll never know because the version that I saw was not because it was completely different by the top it arrived from Australia to the US.
I really wanted to see Till Human Voices Wake Us from the moment I saw the trailers-probably some time before it was released in 2002. I’m a huge fan of Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter. They both do a great job, but I’m going to need every filmmaker who is not Guillermo del Toro to intern with him before attempting to depict magical realism. One imdb commenter said that Till Human Voices Wake Us reminded that person of Solaris, which was a generous comparison and accurate ambition probably held by the filmmakers.
Till Human Voices Wake Us takes a sensational phenomenon and plays it too straight. At least if Till Human Voices Wake Us was going to play it straight, at least, the psychologist main character could have directly addressed the implications of this phenomenon-is he briefly mad and finally has an emotional breakthrough or is it really happening? Effective magical realism would not have to address it, but since everything else is examined and catalogued in Till Human Voices Wake Us, it seems like that option should have been explored.
Till Human Voices Wake Us’ characters exist just to create emotional and character development in the male main character. Usually it is just the girls and women who are in this role, but a childhood friend’s father goes above and beyond to do so as well. Since Till Human Voices Wake Us is told from the psychology professor’s point of view, I guess that he could also be diagnosed with a narcissistic problem as well as emotionally stunted.
Skip Till Human Voices Wake Us and watch any version of Solaris or something beautiful and mournful by Guillermo del Toro.