The Voices

Plot synopsis:
Jerry works at Milton, shipping and delivery department. He lives on his own above MELLOW, a rusty disused bowling alley. He has conversations with his dog Bosco and his cat Mr. Whiskers. One day, his manager compliments his work and chooses him to help organise an employee picnic and a conga line as Fiona suggested in a the meeting. During the preparations, the whole team is in a restaurant and he asks the English Fiona on a date. He invites her to  the best spectacle in the world  and she doesn't know how to decline. His therapist asks Jerry about his prescription taking.Friday night, Jerry watches a Chinese Elvis and a resurrected Bruce Lee while Fiona and the co-workers girls karaoke. On his side he leaves an unlimited Shi-Shan buffet and cross Fiona unable to get home. Jerry stops and gives her a ride. Jerry is in Heaven, everything is bright and Fiona is an Angel. Suddenly in the forest the car crashes into a deer. Jerry's hallucinations show the deer crying out in pain and begging Jerry to kill it, and so he slits its throat. Fiona, terrified, runs off into the woods. Jerry pursues her and trying to reassure her, he makes a lethal gesture. Apologising for hurting her, he ends her pain by stabbing her again and again.  Sorry. Sorry. Upon returning home, Bosco tells him to go the police and confess, and that he is a good man who just made a mistake. However, Mr. Whiskers says there is no shame in killing, but insists Jerry needs to dispose of the body. Jerry goes back to the wood and rolls the immaculate Cinderella body into a carpet. The sheriff asks him about his car crash. At his appointment with his shrink, Jerry confesses that he doesn't take his meds at all. Back home, he dismembers Fiona and places her meat in Tupperware boxes, and her decapitated head in the fridge. After his work Jerry takes his pills, and has nightmares of his abusive past. When he wakes up during the night, his hallucinations have ended; his pets no longer speak to him, and Fiona's head is cold and rotten. He throws away the pills in terror, and the next morning, Fiona smells like a baby-shampoo again. After breakfast, Fiona asks for a friendly severed head to share her days, but Jerry insists that he can't. Butterfly and sparklers are back in Jerrys life. He didn't want to be a slave to drugs but he's still between Rosco and Whiskers.At the end of the next day at five, it's time to invite Lisa, a colleague of Fiona's from accounting, for a drink. He develops feelings for her and takes her to his abandoned childhood home, where it is revealed his German mother had confessed to her insanity and was about to be taken away by the authorities when he was a child. When they arrived, she tried to slit her throat, and begged Jerry to finish the job to end her suffering. Jerry sobs in front of Lisa, who comforts him. They go back to her house and spend the night together. He's in a dream. Lisa is on a cloud. When Jerry returns home, he still feels pressured into killing someone else by Fiona and Mr. Whiskers, and seems unsure of what to do next. Lisa interrupts the sinister meeting. She finds out Jerry's address through Milton's files and brings some cakes to his house. Inadvertently Jerry locks himself out. While he tries to get back in through the skylight, Lisa succeeds in forcing the door open. She sees Jerry's place in real dimension and wanders in and discovers the remnants of the bodies and Fiona's head on the living room table. Lisa says they can forget it and go back to normal. When she tries to leave, Jerry throws her aside and accidentally breaks her neck. Fiona now has a fridgemate. Other co-workers from Milton begin to wonder about Fiona and Lisa. When their colleague Alison goes to MELLOW, Jerry immediately kills and dismembers her. A new companion in the fridge and the voices add in the apartment.Jerry looks very bad. He falls apart in front of his counsellor Dr. Warren and confesses his killings but she tries to make a call. He takes her hostage into the countryside and forces her to help him. She calms him down and shows understanding, which makes him feel better.  Ten years of therapy in ten seconds.  Meanwhile, John and another colleague finds Alison's car behind Jerry's house. They break into it, they retreat immediately and call the police. When Jerry returns home, holding Dr Warren, cops surround his house and prepare to move in. Jerry flees down into the basement, breaking a pipe. Dr. Warren is taken to hospital. The police are knocked back when the pipe Jerry broke causes a gas leak, which leads to a huge explosion. Down in the bowling alley, Jerry collapses and dies from smoke inhalation.After a long corridor, in a white void, Bosco and Mr. Whiskers says Goodbye to each other. Jerry meets his parents, then appears with Fiona, Lisa, and Alison, and Jesus, and they all dance together.  Sing the Happy song. Sing the Happy song. Come on clap your hands. Sing the Happy song.

Tags: comedy, murder, flashback

Review:
The voices is a very dark comedy; there were parts which were completely laugh out loud funny (eg: many of mister whiskers' lines) and other parts were tragically serious.
It has a brilliant performance from Ryan Reynolds, in a role that is pretty unusual for him, and allows him to get out of his typical action stereotype, as he really is a great comedic and dramatic actor, when paired with the right script.
Overall I enjoyed this a lot, mainly because I'm drawn to oddball films like this, but also because I haven't seen Ryan Reynolds this good in, well, forever.
The Voices is a brilliant film about schizophrenia that balances horror and comedy with such aplomb you forget that what's happening on the screen isn't exactly healthy or good.
Jerry at his core is happy there and he likes his co workers, too bad about the little accident that starts it all going down hill.If you like your comedy strange, you too will be a fan of this film.
The Voices is a dark comedy starring Ryan Reynolds who begins to hear voices through both his cat and dog who try to persuade him to do certain good or not so good things.
*SPOILER* Once I realized this movie was from the point of view of a schizophrenic serial killer with occasional glimpses of what the reality he was actually in were, it was a pretty damn good watch.
Dark comedy is not an easy genre but it seems they did a good job with this movie.The plot was also awesome, the visuals are beautiful to look at and there seems to be a lot of attention paid to detail.
However, the dialogue was a bit forced at times and I usually find myself cringing when watching a British actress (in this case Gemma Arterton) having to read lines written in a very stereotypical way.Ryan Reynolds is fantastic as the main character and really makes the audience feel for his character.
I had a slight problem with other members of the cast who I felt were not quite up to the standard that Reynolds set although Jacki Weaver was great as his psychiatrist and Anna Kendrick did a good job at playing his love interest.Overall, I feel that 'The Voices' was a surprisingly good film.
In fact, it is so rare, that on the handful of occasions where Ryan would make a facial expression or use a tone of voice that was familiar, I found myself noting, "Oh, there's a Ryan expression." There is a shower scene and die-hard Reynolds' fans will probably find themselves hoping the camera will pan down to his chest (they don't), despite the fact that he is not in his usual ripped condition.I watched the movie twice in a row.
Although there are certain hints that this film is not entirely what it seems at first, you are basically led to believing it is your average comedy experience with just a minor twist or two.Jerry, played by Ryan Reynolds, has a couple of love interests at his workplace -- Fiona and Lisa, played by Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick, respectively.
While Arterton's character is a bit of a nag, Kendrick's character is her usual girl-next-door type, and they both lend a lot to the romantic comedy feel of the film.Then again, at some point it becomes clear that this is one of those psychological thrillers that challenge the border between good and evil.
The dialogue is both hilariously and realisitically awkward and as someone who has mental health issues (although not to the extent of Reynolds' character) I can honestly say that this movie represented the struggles of therapy, taking your medicine, and balancing the voices in your head perfectly.
The film starts off nice and slow and then takes quite a dark turn, well quite a few actually and merges comedy, schizophrenia and bloody violence in a very original way.
Acting from Ryan Reynolds is really good as he managed to portray this crazy character in such a way that it is really hard not to like him despite his mind going completely off the rails and him doing horrible things to some really nice people.
His cat and dog voices were really funny too.If you like offbeat films, dark humour and original writing, The Voices should be your choice for sure..
Likable Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) stumbles innocently into the role of a killer, guided along the way by his evil talking cat and benevolent talking dog.Reading other reviews, you will find words like "genre-bending" or "a mess", and indeed, the film is a bit uneven.
"Genre-bending" is the polite term employed by publicists, but a less politic word for the film is "mess." Frantic stylistic shifts between black-comic whimsy (chatty pets and equally voluble severed heads) and gruesome drama doom this curio, which stars Ryan Reynolds as Jerry, a bathtub-factory worker who at first seems merely a little slow but is gradually revealed to be deeply disturbed.
Mr. Whiskers, the cat, is a foul-mouthed psycho who, in a Scottish brogue, encourages Jerry to become a serial killer, while Bosco, the kind-hearted dog with a dopey Southern accent, tries to steer Jerry into being like him — a "good boy." It's a great joke and the early going amounts to a hilarious SNL sketch, but then both Perry and Satrapi flounder for what to do next as the levity disappears for long stretches and sickeningly staged mayhem takes its place.It wouldn't be accurate to call the film a horror comedy because so many scenes are played less like terror-fantasy and more like "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." Meanwhile, the plot gets stuck in idle as we wait for the citizenry to get wise to Jerry's string of slayings.
The end credits further reinforce the point that the film wanted to be more brazen and more stylised but ultimately highlights only the uncertainty of the previous 104 minutes.Ryan Reynolds certainly carries the appearance of Norman Bates and in the past has shown his comedic nous but in The Voices never really convinces - whether this is due to the material, direction or lacklustre performance - you feel he is let down as the film never builds convincingly from a entertaining premise (which tires quickly).One small aside is the name of the town and the mention of Lucifer gives the movie a hint of Paradise Lost (i assume intentional) which makes the end credits more interesting and a very different meaning to the film.
One of my favorite things about it was discovering what kind of film this really was, so i will be VERY vague in this review.Ryan Reynolds stars as Jerry, a sweet but awkward man working in a toilet factory.
This film features not only a great performance by Ryan Reynolds, but it features a good attempt in terms of story, character development and production value.The film follows an upbeat man named Jerry (Reynolds ) who works at a bathtub factory, and lives in a modified apartment above a bowling alley with his dog Bosco and his cat, Mr. Whiskers (both voiced by Reynolds).
From there, it takes Jerry further into his psychological personality and challenges him to embrace his 'sinister' side while fighting to know what his happiness is.What I could take from the film is the fact that the story's protagonist can be seen as a likable or hated character, either way we can see that his journey explores into his dark past and yet at times during the film we are given moments of dark humour; especially from his pets who engage with Jerry with social conversations about whether to be good (Bosco) or to be truly sinister in the world (Mr Whiskers) and at times Jerry himself in the social world.
The supporting cast features the talents of Gemma Arterton, Anna Kendrick and fellow Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver (from Silver Linings Playbook) and more, they are given great moments and they handle themselves well in the film, aiding in the darkly tale of Jerry's schizophrenia.Looking at now direction and production value, it's directed by graphic novelist Iranian-born French Marjane Satrapi who gives the film a fairy tale vibe but for adults and exploring the themes of schizophrenia, identity, love and the will to be the better or worse man.
Cinematography is dark and convincing like if it's a horror film thanks to Maxime Alexandre (The Hills Have Eyes, P2), he manages to make the darker side of Jerry's personality really grim and can balance the lighter side to Jerry's good persona.Overall, The Voices is funny, dark, driven to that balance horror and comedy with such aplomb you forget that what's happening on the screen isn't exactly healthy or good.
Mr Reynolds gave a performance, one aspect of which had a special resonance with my fellow-Glaswegians in the cinema audience, thus making it one of the funnier aspects of this film, which in itself was very light on laughs.There is good support from Anna Kendrick who gives a strong and believable performance.
Sadly, another film, like this one, which is only half good.Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick, and Gemma Arterton, are all talented actors.
-The Voices (2015) movie review: -The Voices is a dark comedy about a likable, yet somewhat challenged guy, played by Ryan Reynolds, who tries to win over the affections of one of his coworkers.
The only problem is that he is a complete sociopath who hears voices coming from his cat, his dog, a dear, and a head.-I like dark comedies, so yeah, I enjoyed a film about an evil cat manipulating a crazy guy to kill people.-The story was original.
There is come violence, but most of it is off-screen, and although it suggests one scene, there is no nudity or anything.-The Voices had some things I did not like as much, but all-in-all I had a lot of fun with this dark comedy.
Still, with the help of prescription drugs via his psychiatrist (played by Academy Award nominee Jackie Weaver), Jerry is able to adapt as best he can into society and has recently acquired work at a local factory where he falls for co-workers Fiona (Gemma Arterton) and soon later, Lisa (Anna Kendrick).Unfortunately, the two women thrust into Jerry's lives have no inclination that Jerry has psychotic snaps and routinely talks to his two pets – a cat named Mr. Whiskers and a dog named Bosco.
But Reynolds hits his target and the direction of Marjane Satrapi allows the film to enter zones of discomfort but brings things back to the heart of Jerry which is conflicted and terribly confused.There are not enough dark comedies surrounding head chopping serial killers so The Voices was a treat outside of the mediocrity that crams our viewing schedule.
Acting was solid, pacing directing very good, at running time 1 h 40 min this movie doesn't drag and is involving from start till finish.Overall, "The Voices" is a good black R rated comedy.
But Reynolds did a great job in this movie playing a very strange character, that gets all your sympathy although doing terrible things.
Great work by Gemma Arterton (so good she takes you right out of the comedy to wrenching horror), with Anne Kendrick who is so personable and nice.
And then it would veer back to some slasher film, while the end credits, an almost Bollywood dance number with a little Christian mockery, feel like WTF filler.I saw a comedian tell a joke once that went: "They captured this serial killer and he said the Voices made him kill all those people.
After appearing on a list of the best unmade screenplays in 2009, The Voices see's the light of day in 2015.Ryan Reynolds plays Jerry, a schizophrenic loser, a boy trapped inside a man's body, struggling to fit in within a town of averages.
Majority of today's audience might find this bull crap, casting Anna Kendrick and Ryan Reynolds which have created a big name in Hollywood but it's great to try and experiment in these kinds of movies.
First this is not a laugh out loud comedy but instead it's an OMG smile on your face type story because it just gets more and more bizarre as the film progresses.If you choose to watch this movie (and please do) keep an eye on Jerry's apartment above the abandoned bowling alley.
The Voices is a dark comedy starring Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendricks.
Before I give my final rating I just wanted to state this is a dark and morbid comedy so if you don't like these American Psycho kinds of movies you're going to hate this.
Who every thought that a movie starring Ryan Reynolds where he talks to his pets like Doctor Dolittle that tell him to kill people would actually make a pretty damn enjoyable film.The story is about are main character Jerry who is a likable bachelor living in a seemingly normal apartment along with his dog, Bosco, and his cat, Mr. Whiskers.
The movie would be a lot funny if Nicolas Cage was cast for this role it will be the best comedy in years because we all know the kind of acting style Cage users in his movies which makes them comedy gold.Ryan Reynolds is the kind of person that I feel sorry for, I mean give the guy a break his past movies got poor ratings and most of his films flopped hard at the box office.
Good work Ryan.The director of this movie Marjane Satrapi who previously did a film called Persepolis which I think not a lot of people saw, which is a shame really because it's a great movie.
But given the fact that it had a good crew to work with Reynolds, Kendrick etc, I thought I might just give it a chance and I don't regret it a bit!Without giving any spoilers, the movie revolves around a likable guy who just happens to talk to his evil pets.
What I found interesting about this is that it's pretty easy to empathize with the main characters because there are a lot of explanations nicely wrapped either through the voice of the main character or sweet memories.I would recommend it to people who like to watch dark comedies and are amused by the weirdness of having a head inside a fridge (without any type of real desire to kill other people of course)!.
All the time he is doing these deeds, you sort of feel sorry for Jerry.Great work by Ryan Reynolds in the lead role.
And this weird combination at the hands of director Marjane Satrapi turned out to be a creative force to be reckoned with.The story is about Jerry (played by Ryan Reynolds), a social misfit of sorts who is living isolated and alone, with only his cat and dog to keep him company.
When Jerry stops taking his medication, he is empowered to do things prior prohibited to him, but it comes with a price; his dog, Bosco, and cat, Mr. Whiskers, are talking to him.There is a good amount of dark comedy to the story told in "The Voices", and it does have a macabre enough twist to it that it actually caters well enough to fans (like myself) of the horror genre.
"The Voices" is a movie that I can strongly recommend that you take the time to watch, especially if you enjoy dark comedies with a hint of the macabre and grotesque..
Ultimately it's the fear of losing the voices and comforting fantasy that makes him resist taking them.Reynolds has obviously starred in many films over the course of his career, but his performance of Jerry seems to be a very strange, but unique challenge.
Not only does Reynolds play as Jerry, but he also portrays the voices of several other characters, all of whom he must interact with during various parts of the film.
Jackie Weaver also stars as Jerry's psychiatrist, however it's unfortunate that her character is underused and wasted until well into the final act of the film.The Voices switches from incredibly dark scenes of dealing with untreated schizophrenia to amusing moments featuring a foul mouthed Scottish talking cat in a matter of seconds and admittedly it is quite difficult to keep up with at times.
I use to enjoy Ryan Reynolds appearances in "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place" I wasn't at all surprised with his acting when I watched this Movie.
The writing is pretty decent and Ryan Reynolds makes this film work, it just didn't have that uncomfortable humor I was looking for.
I thought Ryan Reynolds did an amazing performance, he makes you feel sorry for him even though he may do some horrific insane things, If you enjoy Dark Comedy then you will enjoy this movie...I enjoyed the campy feel with the movie as well as the characters.
This film is a incredible comedic look at a "psychopath".Jerry(Ryan Reynolds) hears voices in his head and he sees them through his cat(Mr.Whiskers) and his dog(Bosco).
This movie is a definite watch it to anyone that likes a little crazy in their films.
The film takes on a "look who's talking" approach to the voices Jerry is hearing which leads to some hilarious scenes involving a cat, a dog, and a few severed heads.
Although Ryan Reynolds portrayal of Jerry is both funny and harrowing he is not the only character who you will leave the movie thinking about.
"Do you ever hear voices?"The Voices is a bizarre dark comedy starring Ryan Reynolds in one of his best performances to date.
The Voices takes a common element from animated films and applies it in a dark way here in this live action movie.
The highlight of the movie, is Ryan Reynolds' performance; he's pretty much never been better.
Most comedies about murder and death are dark but Ryan Reynolds is such a likable guy that it really adds to the experience and tone of the movie.