Official synopsis: Looking for a new beginning, Sam (Gia Crovatin) and Jack (Jeff Ayars) leave Boston and move into Sam’s childhood home on a picturesque lake in New Hampshire. Despite the natural beauty and small-town charm, the couple struggles to adjust. Sam wrestles with her stagnant career and is forced to confront the traumatic events of her past. Their uneasy transition becomes even more unsettling when Henry (Jermey Holm), a peculiar lifelong local and neighbor, raises suspicion. When Sam discovers a necklace she believes belonged to her late mother and an antique diary, she begins to suspect that the spirit of an ancestor is trying to reach her. As the seasons pass, tension escalates.
Cowriters/codirectors Abby Brenker and Ellyn Vander Wyden craft a slow-burning psychological chiller with Voices Carry (2025). The horror here deals with the mystical and the possibility of the supernatural, as Sam becomes increasingly obsessed with an old journal that relates not only a familial tale but one involving the local townspeople of time past.
Voices Carry is far more focused on tense drama than startling shocks. As seasons pass at Sam’s lakeside childhood home, her relationship with Jack — whose frustration with her obsession grows into anger and dismissal — deteriorates, leaving her alone at the residence, which by now has grown eerier, along with the lake.
Sam has a sudden change of heart about neighbor Henry, who she and Jack were at first leery of, but after a phone call with her father, Sam clicks with her childhood friend to the point that he becomes her confidant and even assistant in researching the book’s secrets. The turn is so sudden that it felt a bit awkward to me. Another minor issue I had with the writing is that Jack hits all the tropes of a skeptical husband in horror films without adding much new to the character. Otherwise, I found the dialogue and writing very well done.
The strongest point of Voices Carry for me is the acting. Crovatin gives a standout performance as the troubled Sam, who is mourning the death of her mother and trying to make her fractured relationship with Jack work, only to be caught up in generational trauma. Holm gives another solid fear-fare performance, with his character going from the creepy neighbor trope to Sam’s collaborator. Though Jack is basically a — by turns — distant, annoyed, suspicious, and skeptical workaholic, Ayars puts his all into the character.
Brenker and Vander Wyden do a fine job of infusing Voices Carry with a constant sense of melancholy and dread. Fans of slowly mounting psychological horror films should find plenty to enjoy with the film.
Voices Carry had its world premiere on March 15, 2025, at Cinequest.
You can view the trailer here.
