In due course skeletons will march out of closets, but the movie yields up its secrets with slow reluctance.
The Secret Life of Words
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Spain, Ireland · 2005
1h 52m
Director Isabel Coixet
Starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Javier Cámara, Danny Cunningham
Genre Romance, Drama
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A touching story of a deaf girl who is sent to an oil rig to take care of a man who has been blinded in a terrible accident. The girl has a special ability to communicate with the men on board and especially with her patient as they share intimate moments together that will change their lives forever.
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What are critics saying?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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