Cinequest 2025 Review: VOICES CARRY, Grim Generational Trauma Thriller

If countless genre films have taught us anything, returning to a lake house where you spent your childhood and where some troubling events may have occurred is never a good idea.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Sam (Gia Crovatin) and her husband Jack (Jeff Ayars) are doing in the opening scene of Voices Carry, a feature directorial debut by Abby Brenker and Ellyn Vander Wyden that has recently premiered at the 2025 Cinequest film festival. Sam is somewhat recuperating after her restaurant business has gone down, so the fact that something happened to her mother here years ago takes a backseat for a while.

It doesn’t help that almost immediately after their arrival, Sam and Jack are greeted by a boisterous neighbor, Henry (Jeremy Holm), who used to babysit Sam and is now overly enthusiastic about seeing her. Considering that he’s introduced by a shot of him lounging in an outdoor bathtub with binoculars, Henry immediately comes across as suspicious.

Soon, however, he becomes Sam's primary confidant as she discovers an old diary depicting disturbing events from hundreds of years ago. While strange occurrences continue to happen to Sam – she finds a necklace in the lake that may have belonged to her mother, nearly drowns after some force pulls her down, and hears mysterious sounds and voices – she becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth about the diary.

Conceptually, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between Brenker’s and Vander Wyden’s film and The Shining, specifically Stanley Kubrick’s screen adaptation, rather than Stephen King’s original book. In a way, it is also a story about a person who, in the middle of some personal troubles, grows increasingly disenfranchised from the surrounding reality.

Although Voices Carry is divided into several parts titled after the seasons, it’s with the winter that the film comes into its full swing. And at this point, with the help of all the icy, chilly landscapes captured beautifully by Mauricio Vasquez, the parallel becomes aesthetical too.

The notable difference, of course, is that Voices Carry is told from a female perspective, and it’s a distinctive diversion. When Sam gets more and more invested in the events of the past, she is subjected to sadly familiar treatment towards women who display “abnormal” behavior.

Sam’s husband doesn’t fully understand what’s happening with her, so he resorts to the common suspicions about possible infidelity. Jack fails to see why his wife would react and connect to the events that happened so long ago so strongly, not realizing that voices indeed tend to carry, especially when so many patterns in the treatment of women haven’t changed all that much throughout the years.

Considering the film strongly leans towards the psychological exploration of traumatic experiences instead of stirring action, a lot of emotional weight to carry falls on the lead actors. Gia Crovatin, who already has experience with thrillers, thanks to House of Darkness and Fear the Night, has a great balance in projecting obsession and vulnerability.

Jeremy Holm as Henry has the perfect dubious, potentially malevolent presence. And it is always nice to see (in this case – hear) Dwayne Hill, who is most known as Coach Carr from Mean Girls. Here, his hilariously terrible Sex Ed pep talk of “don’t have sex because you will get pregnant and die” starts to bear surprisingly realistic and ominous relevance.

The film enjoyed its world premiere at Cinequest. Visit the film's page at the official site for more information.