The Secret Life of Words

Village Voice by

In due course skeletons will march out of closets, but the movie yields up its secrets with slow reluctance.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

A tantalizing and beautiful picture made with tremendous integrity, and anchored by two marvelous performances, Isabel Coixet's The Secret Life of Words still, somehow, doesn't quite work.

New York Daily News by Jack Mathews

Given the physical limitations of their characters, Polley and Robbins give remarkably compelling performances, and though the resolution of their slowly evolving relationship is a bit too pat, it is one you won't soon forget.

Variety by Jonathan Holland

Sarah Polley gives a wonderfully searching performance, as a woman in a state of extreme isolation, in The Secret Life of Words, a compellingly claustrophobic drama set mostly aboard an oil rig.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Carries an important and timely reminder about the fate of torture victims, so deftly wrapped within a touching and beautifully acted melodrama that the result is the furthest thing from a didactic message movie.

The New Republic by Stanley Kauffmann

Like Ceylan--like many a fine director--Coixet has made her film less as a drama than as the traversal of a state of mind, a mood.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

The exquisitely coordinated performances elicit an empathy as powerful as anything I can remember feeling in a recent film.

New York Post by V.A. Musetto

Yes, The Secret Life of Words owes much to Lars von Trier's 1999 "Breaking the Waves." But Coixet's riff stands on its own thanks to thoughtful performances by Polley and Robbins.