The Voices (2014)

The Voices arrived in 2014 with a director of genuine political pedigree, Marjane Satrapi, and promptly declined to use any of it. Ryan Reynolds plays Jerry Hickfang, a plumbing fixtures factory worker whose schizophrenia manifests as a cheerful dog, a malevolent cat, and, eventually, a refrigerator full of severed heads that will not stop talking. It is a black comedy about a serial killer, which is to say it is a film that knows exactly what it is and has no interest in apologizing for it.

The clinical material deserves a small allowance. Jerry's hallucinations, his medication, the childhood that produced him, and the abusive father who haunts his dreams are all rendered with a certain care. The film does not treat his condition as a metaphor for society's ills, nor as an invitation to scold the audience about stigma. It treats psychosis as a source of dread and, occasionally, of jokes. That is not an affirming posture. It is an old-fashioned one, and it earns the film a modest credit for engaging the subject at all, while forfeiting any claim to a modern sensibility.

Everything else is absent. The cast is white, the factory is a setting and never a thesis, the women are victims and the pets are accomplices. There is no sermon, no climate anxiety, no reckoning with history. The film ends in a white void where Jerry apologizes to the women he murdered and Jesus appears and everyone sings. A viewer seeking instruction will leave empty-handed. A viewer seeking a strange, grisly, oddly tender comedy will be well served. The classification is straightforward: a film with nothing to teach and no apparent desire to try.