Taglines: Silence is calling.
Voice From the Stone movie storyline. In post-World War II Italy, Malvina is on her deathbed at her ancestral home. She tells Jakob, her adolescent son, that another woman will come, a woman who will love him, and that the next words he speaks will call Malvina back to him.
Seven months later a British nurse specializing in children’s care, Verena, arrives. Jakob hasn’t spoken since his mother died and Verena is the latest English-speaking (per Malvina’s wishes) nurse recruited by Klaus, Jakob’s father. Verena meets estate keeper Alessio and retired house maid Lilia. Though polite, Jakob is cold and distant.
Verena learns that Malvina’s family owned the estate and surrounding quarries for 1,200 years. Malvina was the first descendant not to run the quarry, instead becoming a world famous pianist. Since most of the men who worked there died during the second world war, she allowed the quarry to flood, though Alessio still lights a flame for long-dead quarrymen, proclaiming “Life. Death. Love. The stone was everything.”
When Verena looks in on Jakob one night, she finds him with his ear to the stone wall in his room, listening. Klaus fears that Jakob believes he can hear Malvina in the stone. Verena worries that she is inadequate and that Jakob’s condition requires a mental health specialist. When Verena sees Jakob on the ledge of a tall tower, she endangers herself to rescue him – making her (and Jakob) realize that she cares for him and must stay to help him.
She caringly explains that the voice he hears is real, but that it is just his mind playing tricks on him. The next day Verena sees him listening to Malvina’s tombstone in the family mausoleum. Alessio informs her that 40 generations are buried there “in the stone”. Verena, who was orphaned around Jakob’s age, tells the boy that she already knows that wishing to hear dead loved ones does not make it happen.
Voice from the Stone is a 2017 American supernatural psychological thriller film directed by Eric D. Howell and written by Andrew Shaw, based on the novel of the same name by Silvio Raffo. The film tells about a young patient of a female psychologist, who gave a promise to the dying mother to remain silent, until her spirit returns. The film, shot in Italy, stars Emilia Clarke, Marton Csokas, Caterina Murino, Remo Girone, Lisa Gastoni and Edward George Dring. The film was released on April 28, 2017 in limited release, video on demand and digital HD.
Film Review for Voices From the Stone
rief takes on many forms, often revealing itself through sorrow, anger, withdrawal, or regret. But in none of its manifestations is it as tidy and meticulously arranged as in Eric D. Howell’s Voice from the Stone. The film spends such an inordinate amount of time wrapping up the grief of a child who’s lost his mother in stylistic window dressing and inchoate narrative conceits that it loses all sense of emotional immediacy and compassion for those effected by grief.
The overly ornate visual flourishes, mannered performances, and deliberate, plodding pacing consistently undermine the thorny realities of the characters’ emotional turmoil and ultimately impede the film’s ability to plumb the depths of anything other than its own half-baked mythology about the mysterious power of stone from the local quarry.
Following the death of his mother, Malvina (Caterina Murino), nine-year-old Jakob (Edward Georg Dring) awaits the arrival of another woman who, according to the family’s lore, will serve as his new maternal figure. After Jakob goes seven months without uttering a word, Verena (Emilia Clarke), a renowned children’s nurse, arrives at the family’s Tuscan castle to help the boy cope with his loss. Despite not being informed by Jakob’s father, Klaus (Marton Csokas), that Jakob believes his mother speaks to him through the stone in the manse’s walls, Verena devises a number of approaches to prove to the child that the voice he hears is all in his head.
From here, Voice from the Stone begins to increasingly riff on Hitchcock’s Rebecca, which also focuses on the inextricable pull between the past of a large estate and the people living there in the present, but the film fails to adequately develop more than the vaguest conception of the potentially mystical powers that lie within the house and the stone from which it’s built.
As Verena’s decisions seem to vacillate between being self-informed and driven by outside forces, she abruptly transitions from a well-mannered nurse to an impulsive woman willing to pose nude while Klaus sketches and sculpts her. Klaus’s passion is explained by his sudden realization that Verena resembles Malvina, but Verena’s impulsiveness is virtually inexplicable as there was previously no sexual tension or chemistry between the two characters. The context-free affair functions purely as a narrative conceit: to initiate Verena’s direct experiencing of the stone’s mysterious power, and confirming, for her, that Jakob was being truthful all along.
While Verena’s actions from this point on are increasingly linked to the power of the stone, the nature of the connection between the two remains muddled and unclear. The film begins to hastily transform in its third act from staid period piece to Gothic-horror freak-out, and in the process further obscures the mythology it’s established. Rather than arising from a carefully constructed framework built within the film’s narrative, this late shift feels unearned and slapdash rather than an organic extension of the film to that point. But very little here feels carefully developed in the first place.
From its paper-thin and bewildering characterizations to the various ill-conceived directions that its narrative takes, Voice from the Stone is a dramatically inert slog that leans much too heavily on its sense of atmosphere while never taking the time to examine any of the intricacies that lie within its slipshod narrative. You can’t squeeze blood out of stone, but unfortunately, this film can’t squeeze much drama out of one either.
Voice From the Stone (2017)
Directed by: Eric Dennis Howell
Starring: Emilia Clarke, Marton Csokas, Caterina Murino, Remo Girone, Lisa Gastoni, Edward George Dring, Duccio Camerini, Nicole Cadeddu, Antonella Britti, Giampiero Judica, Kate Linder
Screenplay by: Andrew Shaw
Production Design by: Davide De Stefano
Cinematography by: Peter Simonite
Film Editing by: Clayton Condit
Costume Design by: Anna Lombardi
Set Decoration by: Cynthia Sleiter
Art Direction by: Tamara Marini
Music by: Michael Wandmacher
MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality / nudity.
Distributed by: Momentum Pictures (United States)
Release Date: April 20, 2017 (St. Paul premiere), April 28, 2017 (United States)
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