In addition to writing and directing Till Human Voices Wake Us, Michael Petroni co-wrote the screenplay for the hilariously overheated vampire film Queen Of The Damned. Till Human Voices Wake Us sports a distinctly portentous air–its title is derived from a T.S. Eliot poem–but its conception of romance is only slightly more plausible than its director's widely derided Anne Rice adaptation. Guy Pearce stars as a withdrawn psychiatry professor who has repressed his emotions for so long that he's not sure they still exist. Upon learning of his father's death, Pearce travels back to his childhood home, where he watches in horror as a mysterious woman (Helena Bonham Carter) jumps from a bridge into the murky deep. Pearce saves Carter, then nurses her back to health. As Carter tries to recall her identity, the film flashes back to Pearce's golden-hued, Norman Rockwell-esque childhood, when he courted a pretty, poetry-loving girl who captured his heart, then broke it by drowning, leaving him an emotional cripple. As the quirky, beatific Carter comes back to life, it becomes apparent that she's more than an amnesia-stricken stranger. Voices recalls Solaris, another love story between a grief-stricken protagonist and an idealized woman who's more a specter than a human being. The crucial difference is that even when recovering miraculously from wounds or being blasted into space, Solaris' Natascha McElhone was all too palpably human. Carter and her young doppelgänger in Voices are so romanticized that they never seem halfway plausible. Voices is visually impressive, and it sustains a mood of downbeat romanticism throughout, but because it lacks an essential core of humanity, it's never as haunting or resonant as it should be. Instead, it plays like the feature-film adaptation of the most pretentious Harlequin romance novel ever written.