Voices Carry had its world premiere at CINEQUEST 2025 on 15 Mar
Voices Carry opens with an aerial shot looking down on the icy surface of a frozen lake, and then a similar shot of the same lake, only in summer when its waters are a rippling liquid. Sure enough, time will prove to be fluid in writer/directors Abby Brenker and Ellyn Vander Wyden’s debut feature, where as one season leads into the next, the past is also recycled in an eternal return.
Sam (Gia Crovatin) is certainly returning, as she moves with her husband Jack (Jeff Ayars) from Boston back to the New Hampshire lakeside ‘cottage’ of her childhood where more recently her mother Maddy died alone. Still grieving, and under something of a cloud after her restaurant business went under, Sam is hoping to clean the place up and sell it on, while Jack can see its potential as an idyllic family home (once more) for the two of them and possibly even a child. Yet as Sam meets with former playmate Henry (Jeremy Holm), now all grown up into the local weed dealer, different timelines intersect – not only Sam’s personal memories of living here, and the bad vibes of her mother’s more recent lonely death, but also an event from three centuries earlier which has left its ripples in the lake’s alluring water.
The day they arrive, Sam and Jack go swimming in the lake, only for Sam to be pulled under and nearly drowned. Shortly afterwards, a necklace will be found by its waters that her mother once wore, and Sam – and Sam alone – will start hearing strange female cries and whispers reverberating across its shores. She will also discover, and gradually become obsessed with, an old journal which first belonged to Vivian, executed for witchcraft by the community in the early 1700s, and which has subsequently had entries added by many different women’s hands, including Maddy’s. Yet as Sam tries to discern her own place in this mysterious tradition, her increasingly aberrant behaviour drives Jack further and further away, until finally, with winter, Sam must face alone her matrilineal legacy and an unresolved local history that keeps resurfacing.
Like a shifting littoral space that is neither water nor land, Voices Carry operates in a grey zone of ambiguity. For while on the one hand it is a story of a ghostly search for justice down the generations, on the other it concerns the curse of mental illness that can flow through a family’s genetic makeup, with a heroine who hears voices, sleepwalks and seems increasingly dissociative in her behaviour. No matter whether what haunts Sam is supernatural or psychological, it is as much a part of her inheritance as that lake house, passed from mother to daughter across the centuries.
Where Jack witnesses his wife’s nervous breakdown and retreat from reality, Sam sees – or at least hears – the unrestful dead, desperate to see, from beyond the grave, the last word written in the annals of otherworldly retribution. Here different layers of trauma compound like underwater sediments – and in a nation which has guilt and sin built into its very colonial foundations, Sam’s tragic story is also America’s, as historical wrongs send their waves ever forward, and the burden of the past still drags down the present.
strap: Abby Brenker and Ellyn Vander Wyden’s feature debut haunts its heroine with hereditary mental illness and/or an indignant littoral ghost
© Anton Bitel
