Home is where the horror is. Some of the most iconic horror settings are homes, whether single-family houses in movies like Halloween and Poltergeist, sprawling estates like Manderley in Rebecca or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak, or inhabited hotels like the Bates Motel or the Overlook. The residence of interest in Marjane Satrapi’s 2014 film The Voices is a single converted apartment in an abandoned bowling alley, where Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) lives with his dog, Bosco, and his cat, Mr. Whiskers. It’s also where he butchers and stores the women whom his pets have told him to kill. However, it isn’t the murder or dismemberment that we’re made to find horrific; it’s the mess.
Jerry has an unnamed mental illness. He hears his pets talk to him, like an angel on his shoulder that needs to go on walks and a devil on his other shoulder that needs its litter changed. For most of The Voices, we see Jerry’s apartment as he sees it – a tidy one-bedroom apartment that’s an unremarkable background for his life. But in a few specific scenes, we see that this is in fact a delusion or a fantasy. The apartment is actually cluttered and filthy. Through the editing, acting, mis-en-scène, and the contrast of fantastic and realistic, the unseemly state of Jerry’s apartment is made horrific, more than the blood and body parts.
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The aesthetic language of The Voices eases into its weirdness and unreality. It starts off normally enough. A cheery song about the town of Milton during the opening montage of the machinations of the Milton TK Factory, where Jerry works, sets us in the realm of the tongue in cheek. The first time we hear the pets’ voices, they are offscreen. Jerry comes home and abrasive dialogue in a Scottish accent comes from a new, unseen character. At that point, unless you already know the premise of the movie, there’s no reason to think this new character is not a human, maybe a relative or a roommate. The first visual cue of the fantastic comes as Jerry dances with his office crush, Fiona (Gemma Arterton), at a company picnic. She is shot in slow motion and soft focus – a fairly common film shorthand to indicate the romantic interest – and then she is joined by a few butterflies. We know they aren’t real and that they only exist as part of Jerry’s fantasy of Fiona because they look to be cut out of paper or fabric, wings flapping slightly as they hover as if on wire or string. This is the first hint of what kind of world we can expect from this movie. So, it is with a sense of the whimsical that we return to Jerry’s apartment and meet the owners of the voices, Bosco and Mr. Whiskers.
Things get really weird when Jerry is giving Fiona a ride home because, having just stood him up for a date, she’s having car trouble. Jerry accidentally hits a deer. Its head and neck go through the windshield and the deer speaks, asking Jerry to put an end to its suffering. Jerry slits the deer’s throat with a hunting knife. Fiona, freaked out, runs from the car into the woods. Jerry follows her, still holding the knife, trips, and plunges the knife into her sternum. She, too, appears to be suffering, so he slits her throat as well. When he returns to take her body, she appears like Snow White, lying on a bier of flowers, attended by butterflies. Although we saw her covered in blood when she was stabbed, now she is flawless. Her clothing is ripped, but there is no blood. Her hair and makeup are perfect. Jerry wraps her in a tarp, takes her home, chops her body up into portions, stores them in tupperware containers, and puts her head in the fridge. If the talking deer head is weird, it has precedent in the talking pets. However, what happens to Fiona’s body is the first time the film really messes with our perceptions and implores us not to take “reality” for granted.
At his next therapy appointment, Jerry confesses he has not been taking his pills, and Dr. Warren (Jacki Weaver) stresses that if he does not, he could be put in jail. When he gets home, Bosco encourages him to take the medicine while Mr. Whiskers warns that if he takes the pills he will lose his friends, his pets, and “enter a bleak and lonely world.” It is finally Fiona’s head, talking to Jerry from her shelf on the fridge, that convinces him to take them. He takes his dose and nods off on the couch. There is a flashback montage of Jerry’s traumatic childhood – his sick mother, his abusive father – and Jerry awakes to that horrible bleak and lonely world.
What follows is a series of shots cutting between Jerry and his apartment as he sees it. The shots from his point of view are literally skewed and slightly blurry, like Jerry is just waking up: the coffee table with some dirty dishes on it, towering stacks of pizza boxes wrapped in plastic, a pile of animal shit on the carpet, full garbage bags overflowing from a garbage can, stacks of take-out containers wrapped in plastic on a stand next to lamp with its lamp-shade covered in what might be blood, bloody towels on the kitchen floor, more stacks of pizza boxes wrapped in plastic along every wall, blood spattered on the fridge. The shots are so short that I could only tell what many of them were by pausing on just the right frame. The lighting is darker and less warm than the shots when Jerry is not medicated. The colors are dingy. The details aren’t what’s important as much as the sense and feeling they give: squalor and neglect. His pets won’t talk to him, and when he opens the fridge, Fiona’s head is dirty, bloody, and silent. Jerry dumps the rest of his pills down the kitchen sink and runs into the bathroom and vomits.
The sequence disclosing what Jerry sees when he is medicated
This sequence is jarring because while we have previously seen elements of the fantastic within Jerry’s world, we now see that his world itself is a product of his illness. The scenery of Jerry’s apartment, which we took for granted as real, is revealed to be a delusion. His “normal” is his sickness. His “real” world, when he’s medicated, is overwhelming and dark. What’s horrifying to Jerry in this scene is his lonely reality. What’s horrifying to the audience is the disruption of what we’ve known to be true.
The next time we see Jerry’s “real” apartment is through the point of view of Lisa (Anna Kendrick), Fiona’s coworker in accounting. Although Jerry was intending to kill Lisa to procure a friend for Fiona’s head, they instead spend a romantic night together. Later, Lisa gets Jerry’s address from HR and shows up at his door to surprise him with cake. Jerry had been talking to Fiona’s head, placed on the coffee table. He throws a jacket over it and goes to answer the door. He does not let Lisa in but goes outside to speak with her. He locks himself out. He tells Lisa he can get in by climbing up to the roof and going through the skylight. While he struggles on the roof, Lisa uses a hairpin to pick the lock on his front door. Bosco accosts her, so she doesn’t really get a look at Jerry’s apartment until she has led Bosco by the collar into the bedroom and closed the door. She turns around.
Lisa turns around
Lisa’s reactions to seeing Jerry’s apartment are shot in the same manner as when Jerry was medicated: the scene cuts between Lisa and close-ups of various tableaux in the room. As with the other scene, any movement of the camera indicates that we are seeing from Lisa’s point of view. She closes the door on Bosco, and, as she turns towards the living room, we switch to her point of view, the camera swinging around in the same motion as her body. First she sees a cardboard box and garbage bags. The camera goes back to Lisa, who looks up. The next shot is of water damage on the ceiling. She looks concerned.
Then there’s a shot of three animal turds on the carpet – one is now fuzzy. Lisa looks towards the front door. There are the stacked pizza boxes, the stacked tupperware, blood on the stove and on the lampshade. The lighting and colors are dark. The blood on the lampshade is a mysterious dark stain. The contents of the tupperware are indiscernible. She looks up above the lampshade and there is a shot of bulging garbage bags at the ceiling. Are they piled that high? Are they hanging from the ceiling? The shot is too dark to tell.
Lisa’s view of Jerry’s apartment
Lisa puts a hand to her chest and looks down to see a moldy takeout container. She looks towards the untidy kitchen and sees the cat on the counter. She looks into the bathroom. At this point her face registers mostly confusion. She sees black hair sticking out from under a jacket on the coffee table. There is a cut to a shot from above, outside the skylight. It’s a classic Michael Myers-type of horror shot, wherein we see from the killer’s eyes as he watches his next victim. This is followed by a shot from inside looking up at Jerry framed by the skylight. There’s a shot of the be-jacketed head on the coffee table and then Jerry’s voice, “Lisa.” She whirls around to see him standing there. NOW her face and body language show fear.
It’s a lot of editing in a short span of time. I have broken it down into more or less shot-for-shot detail because it all happens very quickly. But what is actually happening here? The flashes of the apartment that Lisa takes in are not explicitly gruesome. There is blood splatter all over the apartment, but the close-up shots center the clutter, not the blood. Lisa isn’t reacting to a discovery of Jerry’s crime. She does not know that Jerry is a murderer. There are no wide shots of the apartment as Lisa sees it. Her horror is disgust. She is frightened by Jerry because she thinks she has seen something he does not want her to have seen. “I won’t tell anybody,” she says, implying a shamefulness. But “I won’t tell anybody” is also a plea for her life, not because she knows he killed Fiona – nothing in this scene implies that – but because she has trespassed. Moreover, Jerry appears threatening to her not because of the violence he is capable of but because his apartment is a mess.
This isn’t usual household mess – dirty laundry and clutter. It’s waste and filth. The mess in Jerry’s apartment can be better understood through the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas. In their article “Home Sweet Messy Home: Managing Symbolic Pollution,” Delphine Dion, Ouidade Sabri, and Valerie Guillard use Douglas’s theory of symbolic pollution to look at untidiness on an individual level. They define symbolic pollution as “whatever, within a given society, eludes or threatens order. It emerges when things are ‘out of place,’ violating systems of classification.” They then draw a connection between symbolic pollution and untidiness: “Similar to the symbolic pollution described by Douglas, untidiness depends on two conditions, classification and the dangerous transgression of classification.” Tidiness reinforces the boundaries of cultural categories. Untidiness defies them. Jerry’s apartment is threatening and transgressive because his non-participation in the “system of symbolic classification” indicates that Jerry is an outsider. He violates the social order.
In fact, it isn’t Jerry’s homicidal accidents that make him the monster of The Voices; it’s his untidiness. Untidiness and monstrosity are linked by Douglas’s theories. In the chapter “A world of monsters” in his book The Horror Film, Peter Hutchings also draws on Douglas, writing, “the horror monster is a kind of pollutant: it embodies a crossing of borders and a transgressive mixing of categories” – categories such as living/dead or human/non-human. Jerry’s apartment transgresses categories of civilized/uncivilized. In a review of Wolf Creek (Greg Mclean, 2005), critic James Rose writes, “Within horror films, the threat often inhabits the depicted landscape and so must be equated with it, making them as hostile and primitive as the space itself.” If we expand the understanding of “landscape” to encompass any setting, the identification of character with setting in The Voices ties the transgression of Jerry’s apartment to Jerry himself.
Throughout The Voices, “home” is a place of safety and comfort. Jerry describes his mother as having lived her life homesick for Berlin. While trapped in Jerry’s apartment, Lisa says she just wants to go home. For Jerry, home is the fantasy. The reality of Jerry’s apartment is not home; it’s uncomfortable and anxious. It’s polluted. The Voices ends with Jerry’s apartment on fire, the entire bowling alley collapsing around him. “Jerry’s going home,” Bosco’s voice says as Jerry succumbs to the smoke. Jerry finds home in death. Finally freed of the physical mess anchoring him to his suffering, he passes to the world of the transcendent and the divine.
References
Delphine Dion, Ouidade Sabri, and Valerie Guillard, “Home Sweet Messy Home: Managing Symbolic Pollution,” Journal of Consumer Research 41.3 (October 2014): 565-89. https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/41/3/565/2907524.
Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film (Routledge, 2014).
James Rose, rev. of Wolf Creek (2007), https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2007/may-2007/film-rev-may-2007.pdf.
You can stream The Voices on Amazon:
Rachel Hock is a writer living in Cambridge, MA. She has a BA in English from the University of Rochester, where she focused on horror and genre film. You can follow her on twitter at @RachelCraves for tweets about movies and TV, and pictures of her cat, Jaws.
