Sound Of My Voice (2012)

Even though Zal Batmanglij's movie Sound of My Voice is under 90 minutes, made for a tiny budget, and only the beginning of a story he and co-writer Brit Marling imagine as a trilogy, a conversation about the film trails off in all kinds of fascinating directions, from the value of the modern movie-going experience to people growing food in their backyards to President Obama as a cultural touchstone for a young generation

I'm a little surprised at how much of the plot this trailer lays out-- Sound of my Voice is all about the steadily encroaching mystery, the sense that you're losing track of what might be true and what might not, but the trailer seems so concerned with promising you a good mystery that it reveals so many of those twists right away. Then again, I might just have the perspective of someone who saw the film at a festival

The 12-minute clip doesn’t show you much more than you would have assumed knowing the premise. We see Denham and Vicius’ characters being prepared to meet Marling’s prophet, and the teaser gives you an idea of Batmanglij’s eerie tone. The bigger question is this: Does this unconventional approach to marketing help sell you on the film? Would you like to see more films reveal their openings, or would you prefer to go into a movie cold?

Due out in April, Sound of my Voice follows a journalist (Christopher Denham) and his girlfriend (Nicole Vicius) who decide to make a documentary about a cult leader named Maggie (Marling), who claims to be from the future.

Marling would star as a woman hired by a private contracting firm to infiltrate The East, a group described as “a mysterious anarchist organization.” True Blood star Alexander Skarsgard would play the East’s leader, while Page would be Izzy, his former lover who starts to grow jealous at the attention paid to new “recruit,” Marling.

After making a run late in the festival as being the big critical darling of Sundance, then moving on to another successful appearance at SXSW, the tiny indie Sound of My Voice has finally snagged a distributor to match all that critical buzz