THE SOUND (2017)

Studio:       Orion Pictures
Director:    Jenna Mattison
Writer:       Jenna Mattison
Producer:  Michelle Weisler, Jenna Mattison
Stars:     Rose McGowan, Michael Eklund, Richard Gunn, Stephen McHattie, Christopher Lloyd

Review Score:

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Summary:

A paranormal activity debunker finds her skepticism wavering when she investigates strange sounds in an abandoned subway tunnel.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Lower Bay Station, Toronto – 1966 – A female patient from nearby Lakeshore Psychiatric Asylum commits suicide by jumping in front of a subway train.

Present Day – Kelly Johansen, a blogger who debunks supposed supernatural activity using audio technology, travels to see rural farmer Earl, whose grandson claims to have nightly ghost sightings in his bedroom. Kelly ultimately proves that the sightings are an after effect of a neighbor’s crop dusting.

Someone sends Kelly a drawing of a little girl that traces back to the now abandoned and reportedly haunted Lower Bay Station tunnel in Toronto. Kelly leaves behind her fiancé Ethan in Detroit to investigate the case.

Talking about the tunnel with her cab driver, Kelly learns that the woman who committed suicide was possibly pregnant with twins, one of whom was stillborn. Kelly also learns that the subway connected to the Lakeshore facility underground.

While exploring the tunnel, Kelly encounters a teen who tells her that the woman’s ghost is called ‘The Lady in Red’ because of how bloody her body was. Kelly recovers an old doll, hallucinates a swarm of moths, and finds a dead body.

When Detective John Richards arrives to investigate Kelly’s call, the body is mysteriously missing. Kelly explains how she debunks paranormal activity claims through the study of sound waves. John allows Kelly to continue exploring the tunnel.

Kelly continues having haunting visions that include a little girl in a forest with the doll, a toilet overflowing with blood, and a moth emerging from her throat.

Back on the surface, Detective Richards thumbs through a file containing a Lakeshore Psychiatric Asylum patient admission form for Kelly.

Kelly encounters tunnel custodian Clinton Jones. Clinton explains that the tunnel was built on a potter’s field and is haunted by ghosts of the bodies that were buried there.

Kelly’s visions of the little girl asking for help along with an older woman in the forest intensify.

Unable to reach Kelly over the phone, her worried fiancé Ethan hurriedly travels to Toronto to find her.

Detective Richards rejoins Kelly. Kelly tells John that she saw a vision of a woman with no eyes. She also describes the concept of tactile noise, explaining that infrasonic sounds can be felt but not heard, causing hallucinations through vibrations. Kelly notes that the waves detected in Lower Bay Station are strongest where all three tunnels converge. Kelly and John set off in search of the spot to try recording evidence of these hallucinations.

Following a brief encounter with Clifton, Kelly finally deduces that John was the person who sent the picture leading her to Lower Bay Station in the first place. John pulls a gun, telling Kelly that he only wants her to fulfill her job of proving that ghosts do not haunt the tunnel. Kelly tries to flee until John fires a warning shot, forcing her to work with him.

Kelly leads John to the room with the powerful sound waves. Inside, John encounters a haunting vision of his dead mother. From the other side of the door, Kelly watches through a window as John bloodily bursts apart.

Kelly becomes delirious as visions of the little girl intensify again. Kelly travels toward the asylum, having flashbacks to her institutionalization along the way. Unable to find her way out of the tunnel, Kelly calls Ethan for help.

Kelly finds several names, including Clifton Jones’, carved into a wall. Kelly realizes that Clifton as well as the teen she met earlier were hallucinations of dead people.

Kelly calls Ethan again. Ethan’s concern grows when Kelly claims she was brought to the tunnel to help the spirits, including a little girl named Emily. Kelly’s visions of the girl hit their peak.

Ethan finally finds Kelly. Ethan reminds Kelly that Emily isn’t real. Flashbacks reveal that Kelly was kidnapped as a child and abused by a man in a woodland shack before a woman rescued her. Kelly created Emily as a means of dealing with her trauma while being treated at Lakeshore.

Kelly and Ethan exit the tunnel. A swarm of moths flies into the sky. Upon returning home a changed woman, Kelly considers investigating another case of supernatural activity from a different perspective.

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Review:

Kelly Johansen has “spent (her) entire career proving” ghosts aren’t real.  As skeptical as she is of the supernatural, I’m equally skeptical someone can make a “career” out of debunking paranormal activity, particularly when Kelly’s primary platform involves vomiting hashtags via tweet to only 10,000 followers.  Nevertheless, here we are with the setup for “The Sound.”

Kelly’s latest case calls her to Toronto to investigate Lower Bay Station.  An asylum inmate wandered into the underground tunnel in 1966 to commit suicide by subway train.  The now vacant station has reportedly remained haunted ever since.  Kelly is confident her Specs and Tucker audio apparatus will prove, just as it always does, that tactile sound waves, not spirits, are to blame for inducing hysteric hallucinations.  But when she starts experiencing strange visions firsthand, Kelly descends into a dark mystery that may make a believer out of her after all.

“The Sound” has all the basic filmic architecture erected for atmosphere, e.g. a dimly-lit subterranean setting, eerie echoes, muted music, and actors peering into shadows with concerned looks on their faces.  But mood never materializes because this supposed spookiness has no soul.  Imagery excessively occupies itself with drab darkness while largely silent scenes wait for something, anything, to finally stir that isn’t simply Rose McGowan casually exercising her eyes over graffiti on a concrete wall.

Whenever anyone does walk or talk, they do both as though they just stumbled in from a draining dentist visit, with mouths still numb from novocaine.  “Slow” doesn’t come close to sufficing as an adjective.  “The Sound” has all the urgency of a snail on a sloth swimming through salt water taffy.  Momentum suffers immensely from this super sleepy energy.

In keeping with that attitude, Rose McGowan sleepwalks through her dreary performance of a pretty passionless personality.  The film futilely hopes that her single pre-Toronto scene with her fiancé, played by an actor swallowed whole by an absence of chemistry or charisma, and quick phone call with an unseen mother are enough to connect her as a character.  McGowan’s blank face echoes the viewer’s boredom, or perhaps reflects hers, as Kelly stagnates into a hollow vessel facilitating dribbles of plot progression with little by way of emotional engagement.

There are no small parts, except in “The Sound,” where veteran names Christopher Lloyd and Stephen McHattie are fired and forgotten from a limp gun totaling a few short minutes of screen time.  Lloyd laughably receives prominent placement on the artwork despite appearing in an almost entirely irrelevant role.  McHattie wrings more from his meager material, yet is equally underappreciated by the movie.  Choose the wrong times to indulge in deserved yawns and you run the risk of never seeing either actor.

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Speaking of blink-and-you’ll-miss-him actors, Pat Mastroianni thanklessly slips in as “Taxi Driver 2.”  It’s always great for longtime “Degrassi” fans to see ‘Joey Jeremiah,’ except in a film that never shows his face from the front.

Deficient in scares as well as substantial food for thought, Jenna Mattison’s thin script is additionally harangued by plain dialogue on the occasions when it is vocal.  “What are you doing here?” is predictably met by “I could ask you the same thing.”  A jump from an unexpected hand on the shoulder comes with an apologetic “I didn’t mean to scare you.”  Formulaically flat construction underneath every element makes for a terribly dull experience that only grows more so as the movie wears on.

Seemingly made for someone who has never seen a slow-burn haunter before, “The Sound” loads for bear with well-worn tropes like a dirty children’s doll as a memory-sparking touchstone, flashbacks revealing an identity crisis, and an abandoned asylum.  Hitch that wagon to a bizarrely unsteady camera, where it looks like the operator regularly shifts his/her seat while shooting, bland production design, and an even blander story, one wonders exactly where an audience is meant to find entertainment value.  If “The Sound” could make one of its own, it would be a woof because the movie is a dog.

Review Score:  20

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