In short: Voice from the Stone (2017)

Eric D. Howell’s gothic romance about nurse Verena (Emilia Clarke) -  apparently specialised in nursing children with mental problems back to health only to leave them behind crying afterwards - and her misadventures with little Jakob (Edward Dring), his hot, dark and brooding sculptor father (Marton Csokas) and what may or may not be the ghost of Jakob’s dead mother communicating through the stone walls made from the material that made her family rich is if nothing else a very attractive looking film.

It is shot in appropriately moody colours and style and makes visually often arresting use of the setting in the Tuscany of 1950. The acting is on the good side, too, if rather melodramatic, even for a genre that by nature needs to go a bit bigger than life. Alas, the film really feels more “interesting” (in the negative connotation of that term) than artistically successful.


I think the largest part of Voice from the Stone’s problem is pacing. For a long time, it is very slow – even for me as a viewer who usually enjoys slow movies even if only as an opportunity to really take in the sights – but I don’t believe it actually needs to be quite this slow; as it stands, it seems a bit too much in love with showing us all the pretty sights it has than in using these sights for anything much. On the other hand, once the film decides it’s time for Verena to get to her operatic mad scene, it suddenly pulls her from being a bit frightened yet also drawn by the strangeness of her new surroundings and experiences into becoming raving mad in the classic gothic style without much of a transition between these states, which is the sort of thing it might have set up during the slow bits it didn’t do much at all in. I think the ending is pleasantly ambiguous – either it is quietly horrific or a real happy end – but I don’t think either of the two choices is as well prepared by the film as it should have been, again mostly because it has spent half of its running time dragging its feet looking pretty instead of using its prettiness in a meaningful way for its narrative.