I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Holy Crap! A Movie That Didn't Suck



Saint Ange aka House Of Voices 
(2004) France-Romania

Having seen an overload of horrid movies both domestic and foreign I had very low expectations for this movie. I was pleasantly surprised to find a well made movie with beautiful photography, a great music score that added so much to the movie, and a halfway decent story that didn't try to wrap things up in a neat little package by the end. In other words, if Rosemary's Baby had tried even half this hard, they WOULD have had a really scary movie.


Not that this is your jump-in-your-seat type of horror movie. I would call this more a mystery/suspense type of movie - the pace is a little slow but steady and the 'scares' are more integral to the story rather than something to make you hide your eyes. Fangoria tried a similar storyline with Frailty starring Calista Flockhart and I'm telling you now, if you have a choice between the two, you are much better off watching this one. Even at 98 minutes you will not be disappointed - everything is just very lush, very detailed and the story runs with few hitches smoothly through to the end. I would love to know what its budget was as it was shot in both French and English, but there's no info on that. No matter, whatever the money they had, they spent it in all the right places.

Saint Ange

Our story is set in 1958 in the French Alps at an orphanage called Saint Ange. A young girl named Anna, secretly pregnant (she thinks, everybody actually knows) has been hired to clean the place. Right now is where common sense starts to end because this place is absolutely freaking huge - a team of cleaners would take months just to get through it. They have evacuated all the orphans, the only ones to be left behind is mentally disturbed teenager Judith, the cook Helenka, the administrator and a groundskeeper. This place has fallen into horrible disrepair, one of the reasons a fix-up is in order, another reason why there's no freaking way Anna could possibly do this herself, even if she had a year to do it.

Anna

She starts getting a bad feeling right away about the place - not surprising, considering it's an extremely isolated place, horribly run down and hundreds of children have disappeared here. A departing orphan warns her to 'Watch out for the scary children'. Part of her angst I believe is probably the fact that in her recent past, either her family or her former employer beat her severely - her back is covered in scars and burns, and they are probably also responsible for her gravid condition. This is really the only attempt of an explanation we get as to why she becomes obsessed with the place's history and finding out what happened to the children who disappeared. 

The story goes a bit slowly, but Anna eventually forms a real friendship with Judith, the teenager who is constantly being given pills for her 'condition' by the cook. Anna believes that Judith, who has been at the orphanage pretty much her whole life, knows more about the children than she realizes, and encourages her to stop taking her medicine so she can 'wake up' and remember what happened. They really form a sweet bond, and it's obvious that Anna really cares for her, and not just as a source of information.

After a horrid scene where the cook has drowned the cat and litter of kittens it had that Judith was taking care of, she realizes she's been lied to her whole life and she works in earnest with Anna to try to remember what happened in 1946 when 300+ children were sent at once to the orphanage. The cook makes reference to the children being sick, there being only two doctors and hardly any care available, and of course there weren't going to be many in the way of survivors. In fact, only Judith made it through, sort of. 

Judith and Anna

We get the typical sounds of footsteps and children's laughter, shadows of running figures just out of sight, the typical ghost story stuff. Somehow, Judith remembers something about the bathroom. Again, Anna gets a feeling about the place and uses her flashlight to break the bathroom's main mirror, revealing a closed-off room on the other side. Despite the efforts of the cook to prevent her from getting in there, she does and so does Judith. They find evidence of a ward with very small beds, toys, medicines - and a dumbwaiter. Now as Judith is 'awake' she is frightened as she pretty much remembers now what had happened. But Anna, with a strange determination that again is not really explained uses the dumbwaiter despite Judith's protests and goes down down down a long shaft that seems to go far underground (probably only a couple of floors but they had to dramatize it somehow).

Where the children are...

Once at the bottom reality completely slips away. She enters a pristine white hallway with many rooms, some padded, some used for medical 'treatments' and hears voices, more footsteps and sees how the children who arrived in 1946 were probably shoved down here for what? Medical experimentation? Plain abuse? It's not made clear, but there are the presence of children here, and she finally sees them - all bald, dressed in white rags, starved. She begins to feel a pain in her stomach, realizes she is bleeding and the children help her to the floor whispering what I guess is their stories and how they came to be here - it's not made clear. Is is clear that Anna is hemorrhaging, and as the baby starts to come all fades to black.

Anna, now part of Saint Ange...

The administrator and groundskeeper find her there, in the dank, dark tunnel, having used an entrance apparently only they know about. Anna has died, with her stillborn child in her arms. They decide to leave her body there, call the police and declare her missing. Nice. The administrator asks Helenka if Judith is back on her pills, she assures her she has made sure she is. All are now going to leave the building - it's not made clear whether they are closing it for good or not. Before Judith leaves, she says she wants a souvenir, runs upstairs and as she finds a picture and puts it in her pocket, she hears her name being called. She looks in a room and finds Anna and her baby, sitting among the bald, white clothed children, all now part of the orphanage I guess. Judith drops all the pills she's been given - she hasn't taken any and won't. The administrator yells for her and she leaves with the others.

This is not a happy ending, but it wasn't a happy story and I think trying to give it one would have cheapened the movie and been too convenient for such a dark, brooding story. It is a good one if you can stick with it, one of the best made movies I've seen in a while, and worth the time if you like a good suspenseful movie.