Till Human Voices Wake Us

This dead-lover's-ghost story is about a handsome, disconnected Australian psych professor (Guy Pearce, Memento) who returns to his hometown for his father's funeral, only to find himself flooded with memories of the childhood sweetheart whose drowning has haunted his whole disillusioned life. In flashbacks we see him as a cheerful 13-year-old falling tentatively in love with a sweet, open-faced girl whose spirit is completely unrestrained by the polio that keeps her in leg braces. In the present day, oh-so-serious adult Pearce rescues a beautiful stranger (Helena Bonham Carter) from an apparent suicide attempt. When she comes to, with total amnesia, the memories that do eventually return seem to be those of his 20-years-dead teen sweetie--a fact that both entrances and rattles Pearce, and awakens his deadened soul. But the way writer-director Michael Petroni pulls these paranormal events together has little mystique, and his talented stars somehow lack the lost-love emotional spark in the adult characters needed to properly engulf the audience in the picture's supernatural romanticism. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Blackwelder)