Buried somewhere within the 90 stolid minutes of Abby Brenker and Ellyn Vander Wyden’s Voices Carry, there’s a decent Twilight Zone episode. Not from Rod Serling’s iconic original, mind you, but one of the long-forgotten reboots hosted by Forest Whittaker or Burgess Meredith. Voices Carry, which premiered at Cinequest 2025, takes a germ of an idea about generational trauma and then steadfastly refuses to develop it, preferring an M. Night Shyamalan-style approach that turns the screws so lightly and with so little technique that the ending — which felt like it was conceived first and everything else was written to get us there — generates neither sympathy nor catharsis.
Such a slow-moving and uninvolving story needs a star-making lead performance to keep us in the game. But top-billed Gia Crovatin, while holding the film together nicely as a suburban woman who uncovers centuries-old secrets while staying in her family’s lakeside cottage, will not make us forget the quiet horrors that befell Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark or Nicole Kidman in The Others. Her inability to get us invested in her character’s descent is also the fault of Brenker and Vander Wyden’s script, which may fancy itself an upscale combination of ghost story and thriller, but it fails to get neither the heart nor the mind racing.
What Mysteries Lie Beneath the Lake?
2
/5
Looking for a new beginning, Sam and Jack leave Boston and move into Sam’s childhood home on a picturesque lake in New Hampshire. Despite the natural beauty and small-town charm, the couple struggles to adjust. Sam wrestles with her stagnant career and is forced to confront the traumatic events of her past.
Release Date
March 15, 2025
Director
Abby Brenker, Ellyn Vander Wyden
Cast
Nicole Fragala, Alexandra Rey, Jeff Ayars, Robert Aberdeen, Dwayne Hill, Jeremy Holm, Geraldine Singer, Gia Crovatin
Genres
Drama, Thriller
Writers
Abby Brenker, Ellyn Vander Wyden
Pros & Cons
- Its remote lakeside location is beautiful.
- A strong opening maintains our interest for about 30 minutes.
- The main character is way more interested in solving the mystery than we are, and the performances can’t save it.
- It’s neither scary nor thrilling.
- The pacing is slow throughout, which is fine until the story can’t support it.
One good thing you can say about Voices Carry is that it does look pretty. DP Mauricio Vaquez provides icily beautiful widescreen images of the secluded New Hampshire environment where the action, such as it is, unfolds. Crovatin plays Sam, who arrives at the lakeside cottage with her boyfriend Jack (Jeff Ayars) to lick her wounds after her Boston restaurant went belly up. Their only neighbor is Henry (Jeremy Holm), an older friend of the family who used to babysit her. A creepy hulk with a pushed-in nose and a murderous resting face, Henry earns our mistrust immediately, especially when he notes that, unlike in big city Boston, “folks up here actually check in on each other,” which sounds more threatening than comforting.
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As Sam and Jack settle into their bucolic new digs, Brenker and Vander Wyden start introducing clues that something is amiss. Most of the mystery involves the lake, which is where Sam almost drowns when pulled violently under by unseen forces and where she later finds a necklace. Still, she is mostly concerned with the unnerving, pot-smoking Henry, although she rejects her father’s offer to drive up to the lake to run interference and maybe shed light on the strange goings-on and the mysterious fate of Sam’s mother.
A Tired Old Bag of Thriller Tricks
The slow build plays well enough — aided by Simon Taufique’s atmospheric score — on the assumption that the mystery will become more intriguing and that Brenker and Vander Wyden are tightening a noose that will snap in some terrifying way. Neither of these things happen. The film maintains its deliberate and measured tone throughout as Sam gets way more invested in the history of the area than we do. At one point, she finds a book containing clues to some horrible long-ago event which intrigues a town lifer like Henry but frustrates the workaholic Jack, forming even more cracks in their relationship. The weathered old book will play a key role in learning about the town’s tragic history and is a convenient way for Sam to discover the provenance of the submerged necklace.
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Also weathered and old is the bag of tricks that Brenker and Vander Wyden pull from to try and keep us pinned to our seat. Slow dripping water, the lake tinted a menacing red, ghostly echoes, and dimming lights feel almost quaint considering how clever low-budget thrillers have become. Those hoping the whole affair is just a metaphor for depression — the movie unfolds over many isolated and lonely months — will be disappointed.
The film does have something potentially more interesting on its mind, if only it cared enough to explore it. Instead, Sam becomes increasingly obsessed with how her family might be involved in what happened many centuries ago, with each revelation barely justifying the time it took to get there. Not even her new hobby of making and selling pickles (which plays as silly as it reads) will keep the voices at bay or keep her from sleepwalking on the lake.
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‘Voices Carry’ Exists for its Ending
Voices Carry is chilly and high-toned, but it never gets under your skin. Sam and Jack have little chemistry as a couple, and without a strong enough lead performance or more dread or mystery to keep us sympathetic and curious, we’re not invested in Sam’s mental unraveling. The movie seems to exist for its ending, which is foreshadowed when Sam tells her therapist via Zoom, “Things can happen in families out of nowhere.”
But this is not Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, where directorial skill and sleight of hand kept us so riveted that the surprise was like being hit by a two-by-four. Even if Brenker and Vander Wyden are trying to make a more meaningful point about guilt, trauma, and sacrifice, it requires more than an unsettling atmosphere and flipping through an old book to sell it.
Voices Carry, a production of The Unity Group, The Lunatics Project, and MCM Creative, premieres at Cinequest 2025 on March 15. It will screen again on March 19; find more information and tickets here.
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