Till Human Voices Wake Us: Critic Reviews

Petroni takes the poem at face value, turning diaphanous literary imagery opaque and literal in the love song of Sam Franks.

The movie is so busy building its symbolic frame that it forgets to develop its characters, or even to make them likable.

Extremely provocative, to both imagination and intellect.

I'd recommend you actively or passively forget this one.

Despite being well acted and sweetly moving when it strips down to the tender poem at its heart, Till Human Voices Wake Us spends too much time playing to an otherworldly suspense that simply isn't there.

Snoozy supernatural pastoral.

You can tell what will happen in Till Human Voices Wake Us long before it actually happens, but it still works better than it should.

Voices is more a prose poem than a film, a moody exercise devoid of suspense and interactions that spark us to care.

There must still be a kind of moony young adolescent girl for which this film would be enormously appealing, if television has not already exterminated the domestic example of that species.

Pearce and Bonham Carter are remarkably photogenic, but the movie is fitful and mannered to a fault, full of watery allusions and stormy scares.

It walks an odd path through romance, psychology and the netherworld, but it's a walk worth taking.

Till Human Voices Wake Us is so intricately and beautifully crafted, I wish it had been less boring.

The two young actors are very engaging, but the chemistry between Pearce and Bonham Carter is less than zero and there's altogether too much heavy-handed, watery symbolism for comfort.

There's a fine line between bewitching and boring, and you'd better be sure you know which side you're on if you're going to make a film that keeps a key character or event a mystery until the very end.

Despite the strengths of the cast and the camera, the whole film does seem, after the fact, to be less than the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, in mid-reverie, there's no denying the pleasure in falling under its little spell.

It is undone by the twin cinematic demons of pretentiousness and torpor.

Petroni's pacing is so languid in Till Human Voices Wake Us, a viewer has a greater chance of dozing off than getting caught up in a mystery.

Kept in check by his character's neuroses, Pearce holds our attention throughout, but it isn't until near the end that he manages to break free of his character's and his director's inhibitions.

Sometimes engaging, sometimes clunky.

Petroni may have chosen to move the plot along at a snail's pace to reflect the mood of Prufrock's poem, but there isn't enough lyricism in the film to save the story.