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The Secret Life of Words

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Spain, Ireland · 2005
1h 52m
Director Isabel Coixet
Starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Javier Cámara, Danny Cunningham
Genre Romance, Drama

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?

40

Village Voice by

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

60

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.

75

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.

70

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.

88

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.

75

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.

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