So I went to the Philadelphia-ish matinée last summer. It was not quite crowded but still. We had had some hyping due to knowing a person who was somehow involved with the production - we still have no idea how all told considering who this is. So yeah. I'm deaf, and admittedly young, which means I'm not impressed by a movie like Children of a Lesser God, where the appeal of a deaf actress having a main role quickly wore off as the dreadful and abusive relationship unfolded on screen, always presenting everything from the eyes of the hearing partner.
This movie at least has the advantage of being made by a deaf cineast, although it is far from the first full feature film to be so even after the silent film era ended, and even compared to what is a "love it or hate it" "deafploitation" b-movie/horror piece like Deafula, it leaves heavily to be desired.
The signing is at times disjointed, not necessarily sloppy so much as badly shot. Making the subtitles a relatively good thing even for deaf people. The soundtrack feels a bit like a gimmick - dreams in speech, absolute silence except for a musical soundtrack which mostly seems an idea to make things falsely immersing while not too jarring for hearing viewers. At the same time it perpetuates the idea that deafness is a world of absolute silence, when it tends to be far from it: sound is vibration after all, and hearing is a specialized form of touch, and a lot of what can't be heard can be felt.
On the plot, the characters are fairly uninteresting. It's mostly the story of a rather boring deaf man whose wedding was recently called off because his stepdaughter died in a moment of inattention. A lot of time is spent dwelling on it, and in the end, rather the being an interesting piece of character development, it seems simply forced, artificial. It gets pounded on us with the subtlety of an elephant stampede in a porcelain store. His former relationship is shown as relatively shallow, and his new relationship doesn't seem much less so. The thief subplot seems at best forced, at worst stupid headline pilfering. It's integrated poorly in the overall plot and seems to be an excuse to do some broken "character growth". Which, let's be fair, still leaves the characters pretty flat and lifeless.
The proselytizing girlfriend supblot also become blatantly obvious from the moment they first show a church, I'll nonetheless pretend it's a spoiler. He's a man fairly uninterested in religion, but it ends up becoming a big part of his healing process. It's vaguely implied that he converts, and quite honestly, this leaves me relatively cold. The intense proselytizing that is regularly done on the deaf community is something I've known many deaf people who are intensively uncomfortable with it, and it simply makes me queasy to see it being embraced so readily. No surprises in this movie, every little bit of plot is, basically, guessable from the first minute it is introduced: the girl is dead, the new woman will become his wife, the other elitist deaf people viewed later (basically a strawman most of the time) will get told, and he will convert. If you hoped for an artistically interesting or challenging plot, go elsewhere. There's more to deaf cinema than this tasteless stew.
This movie at least has the advantage of being made by a deaf cineast, although it is far from the first full feature film to be so even after the silent film era ended, and even compared to what is a "love it or hate it" "deafploitation" b-movie/horror piece like Deafula, it leaves heavily to be desired.
The signing is at times disjointed, not necessarily sloppy so much as badly shot. Making the subtitles a relatively good thing even for deaf people. The soundtrack feels a bit like a gimmick - dreams in speech, absolute silence except for a musical soundtrack which mostly seems an idea to make things falsely immersing while not too jarring for hearing viewers. At the same time it perpetuates the idea that deafness is a world of absolute silence, when it tends to be far from it: sound is vibration after all, and hearing is a specialized form of touch, and a lot of what can't be heard can be felt.
On the plot, the characters are fairly uninteresting. It's mostly the story of a rather boring deaf man whose wedding was recently called off because his stepdaughter died in a moment of inattention. A lot of time is spent dwelling on it, and in the end, rather the being an interesting piece of character development, it seems simply forced, artificial. It gets pounded on us with the subtlety of an elephant stampede in a porcelain store. His former relationship is shown as relatively shallow, and his new relationship doesn't seem much less so. The thief subplot seems at best forced, at worst stupid headline pilfering. It's integrated poorly in the overall plot and seems to be an excuse to do some broken "character growth". Which, let's be fair, still leaves the characters pretty flat and lifeless.
The proselytizing girlfriend supblot also become blatantly obvious from the moment they first show a church, I'll nonetheless pretend it's a spoiler. He's a man fairly uninterested in religion, but it ends up becoming a big part of his healing process. It's vaguely implied that he converts, and quite honestly, this leaves me relatively cold. The intense proselytizing that is regularly done on the deaf community is something I've known many deaf people who are intensively uncomfortable with it, and it simply makes me queasy to see it being embraced so readily. No surprises in this movie, every little bit of plot is, basically, guessable from the first minute it is introduced: the girl is dead, the new woman will become his wife, the other elitist deaf people viewed later (basically a strawman most of the time) will get told, and he will convert. If you hoped for an artistically interesting or challenging plot, go elsewhere. There's more to deaf cinema than this tasteless stew.