“Tonally unhinged” is the best way to describe this psycho-comedy from the co-director of Persepolis, in which Ryan Reynolds plays a Norman Bates-y “nice boy” with a fridge full of bloody secrets. Tormented by the voices of angels and demons (respectively personified by his dog and cat, supplied with animated mouths), Jerry Hickfang attempts – with little success – to negotiate a peaceful path between his desire to meet people and his habit of killing them. Swerving between pink-hued small-town satire and visceral gore, The Voices aims for the ghoulish humour of Eating Raoul or Parents – and, for the most part, misses.
Reynolds clearly relishes the cracked-personality role, but it’s harder to see what his A-list female co-stars (Gemma Arterton, Anna Kendrick) are getting out of this, with only Jacki Weaver being given much meat into which to sink her teeth as Jerry’s shrink. Chaotic, then, and often ill-judged, but almost redeemed by the closing musical number, which owes an unexpected debt to the underrated Jim Sharman/Richard O’Brien film Shock Treatment.
