The Sleeping Voice

There’s a terrific film to be made about the fallout from the Spanish Civil War, the torture and detainments, the street-level conflicts, the small acts of bravery which helped a shattered populace to keep going in the face of extreme adversity. ‘The Sleeping Voice’ is definitely not that film. Shot like a TV movie, performed like a Christmas panto and scripted with all the delicate subtlety of a Mexican soap opera, this is crass, ham-handed emotional pornography of the lowest order. Maria Leon gives a wildly annoying (but, bizarrely, award-winning) performance as Pepita, the young maid who comes to Madrid to visit her incarcerated, pregnant sister (Inma Cuesta), the wife of a prominent revolutionary. To be fair, the film does attempt to explore the social, political and religious issues crippling the country in the post-war years, but the resulting insights are glib and facetious. Utter sludge.