Saint Ange

Also known as House of Voices, this was an instant stream movie I found on Netflix. Being the fan that I am of the supernatural movie, I threw it into the queue. It was similar to The Other’s in atmosphere, however the story was dull and senseless and only achieved in puzzling the viewer instead of scaring them. I believe that the main reason for this lack of story was due mostly to the fact that they hired my toaster over to write the script. With barely a line spoken, it is no wonder that by the time the credits rolled you were left not understanding the story.

It’s 1958, and a young girl who looks an awful lot like Natalie Portman gets off a bus in the French Alps to begin work as a house cleaner in an orphanage. When Anna arrives at Saint Ange Orphanage, there is no explanation why the children are getting packed onto other busses and leaving the orphanage except the assumption that an adoption faire must be going on and it’s a “Buy One, Get One” extravaganza. So now the building is empty with the exception of the cook and Judith, a teenage nut bag who nobody wanted.

Anyway, again, all in silence, we see Anne unwrap an ace bandage from around her waist and find that this bitch is knocked up. And before you get excited that there will be a back story for Anna, there isn’t, you never find out who she is, where she came from and what is up with the whole bun in the oven thing. Anna spends a total of two scenes cleaning before her pregnancy is discovered by the cook and we spend the rest of the movie silently watching her look at things. Within this pantomime of a movie, we can deduce that Anne has uncovered a conspiracy within the orphanage in regards to the crop of kids that shipped in during the war and eventually died and left us Judith, the buck toothed basket case.

With Judith’s help, I use this term loosely, Anne embarks on uncovering the mystery behind what really killed these kids. My guess is boredom.

It is anybody’s guess what that the bloody hell this movie is about. In a desperate attempt to understand this story, I went so low as to read the message board on IMDB for this movie. It appears that they too are attempting to write the story that wasn’t written. The general consensus is that there must have been a lot of acid in the water because Anne was tripping balls and hallucinating everything. I am all for symbolism in a movie, but when your best guess comes down to the fact that the writer/director believes he is far too brilliant to be bothered with any semblance of a cohesive story I feel compelled to flip this movie the bird and pass it off as my own hallucination. Bloody French.