Don't Listen Review (Film, 2020)
content warning: death by suicide, foul language, gore, violence against women, grieving
Eric and his family move into a new house and he’s having trouble adjusting. He says there are voices that wake him up in the middle of the night and tell him to draw things. Those drawings become real when he finishes them. The demands of the voices only grow from there.
Don’t Listen, originally titled Voces (Voices), is a horror film from Spain. It’s an interesting cross between an evil child and haunted house film. We know from the start that Eric is not responsible for the horrible things that happen around him, but those horrible things are the type of “accidents” that have been a staple of the evil child story since The Bad Seed. They’re caused by the voices forcing influence over the people in the house. Eric, for whatever reason, is who they are choosing to communicate to.
The sound design of Don’t Listen is excellent. The established cue for the voices is that radio static you get in between stations coming from a walkie-talkie near Eric. Then you’ll hear the muffled voices start to come through, whispering something that you might not quite make out. Other electronics will soon start going off—a toy, a lamp, a car stereo—and the characters have no choice but to react. It’s excellent storytelling through sound the signals the shifts from reality to the paranormal world of the new house.
The film does start to make bigger visual swings at the world, which work well enough. The camera does tend to linger on the gore or other grotesque features in the film. The special effects work is good. The pauses just starts to break up the pace of the film a little too much. The same goes for the use of the flies in the house. They’re connected to the voices somehow, but the camera will linger on them even when the CGI is not as realistic as the practical effects.
The reason why the evil child story is typically more ambiguous at first is to build up suspense. We, the audience, know too much about what’s really happening before the adults in the story do. Eric is clearly not the problem, but his parents don’t know that and their concerns drive the shape of the film. Our mystery is “What is going on with the voices?” The parents’ mystery is “What’s wrong with our son?” We know the answer to their question right away and that lessens the suspense for the opening stretch of the film.
There is a massive twist going into the second act that drastically changes the course of the film. It’s a brutal but rewarding choice that resets the action. The shift in narrative is far more fulfilling than the out of sync concerns the family originally faced. For comparison, it shifts the story and tone from something like Mama to something like Melancholia.
Don’t Listen isn’t a bad horror film. It just undercuts its effectiveness with some of these editing and structural choices. There are some great scare sequences in the film and the use of sound is so different from what we typically get in modern horror. Once you get through the first act, there’s a far more rewarding horror film to engage with.
Don’t Listen is streaming on Netflix.
