A Silent Voice

GAAAAAAAAHHHH

This is the noise I make then great opportunity goes wasted.

A Silent Voice cements it's gimmick pretty quickly, there's a new girl in elementary school and she's deaf. At first she's presented as a quirky peculiarity among the regular students, but eventually I guess people just get intolerant of having to interact with her through her notebook or side lessons involving sign language to the point that characters who were previously proactively helpful towards her just straight up resort to bullying.

I really don't know if this was the intended mood the movie meant to convey, I thought I was following a Relateable Male Protagonist, but surprise, he's actually a Awful Douchebag. I was confused as to how this movie was supposed to go because I see a couple possible avenues:

In Kotoura-san, Kotoura is mercilessly ostracized by her parents and classmates and becomes an extreme social outcast until the doofy male lead comes into her life and slowly lights it up.

In Kimi ni Todoke, Sawako is already a social outcast but becomes increasingly attached to the male lead over time as their relationship slowly develops.

Here, given the atmosphere I had assumed that the male lead was our usual doof, but would find his sensitive side interacting with Deaf Girl, but instead he just sort of observes her from afar and becomes absolutely vicious towards her any time she tries to interact. Even after this same guy makes a habit of ripping her hearing aids out and throwing her books in the fountain, Deaf Girl is still ceaseless nice, unphased, and apologetic to him, to the point that she seems totally unrealistic as a character.

After a certain point our "hero" is called out for bullying Deaf Girl and losing/damaging over 8 of her ******* hearing aids that he ends up getting bullied too (which is not altogether clear at first because it's edited like ****).

Fast forward into high school or college and Main Guy has nothing going for him, to the point that he wants to kill himself. One day he walks into Deaf Girl again and the movie starts for real, with him wanting to make amends with her and struggling against his old social circle and Deaf Girl's family to get along.


There's a whole subplot about him coming out of his shell and interacting his ordinary people which infuriatingly dominates the movie by the end of it.

We see Deaf Girl's mom straight up hate his guts on sight, we see Bully Girl come back and be just the absolute worst sort of human being to Deaf Girl and, and we see Deaf Girl struggle to eek out a confession to Main Guy, but get rebuffed because she struggles to articulate herself, all leading up to a dramatic scene where she abandons him at a festival, goes home, and attempts to jump from the balcony.

We can infer why she feels so bad about herself, but the movie's attempts to articulate her motivations are poor and confusing, of course, Main Guy arrives just in time to see her try to kill herself and manages to save her life while falling over the rails himself. One would think he died and that this is one of those damnable bittersweet endings, but no, in fact he survived, and the movie's not gonna end for a while.

The movie's already hit it's climax, it's made us sympathize with the two main leads, got us to want them to get together, already teased a love confession, but none of that ultimately comes to pass. Bully Girl NEVER gets her comeuppance despite being an awful person in both incarnations in which she appears, the movie begins stressing out about how Main Guy has friends now, even though he's really only got one friend apart from Deaf Girl and her family, and the other three characters are just there for some reason.

And it all ends with him attending yet another festival and bursting into tears after opening himself up to people around him, which the movie makes allusions to being like he's begun to listen for the first time.

I wouldn't have an issue with this kind of shoe-on-the-other-foot scenario if it felt like they were building up to this, but it doesn't feel like that at all. They use Xs on peoples' faces to show who Main Guy has closed himself off to, but they appear and drop multiple times throughout the movie until it's clear he really only cares about his circle of friends, which... since when was that a problem?

I will admit the suicide scene was spoiled for me, although I didn't realize it was from this movie when I saw it. They do try to make it emotional, but even putting that aside, I can't help but feel like the hospital scene involving Deaf Girl's mother bowing head-to-the-ground to Main Guy's mother was WAY MORE impactful. From what little we've seen and know about these two characters' relationship, Main Guy's mother is already fearing of Deaf Girl's mother, because she had to apologize and pay for her son's bullying years before, and Deaf Girl's mother until only recently hated Main Guy's guts, and yet she's the one prostrating herself to the mother of the guy who saved her daughter's life.

I wish that relationship was explored more, that's the part of the movie that got me more that anything, not the main character saving his love interest from a suicide attempt and almost killing himself in the process.

I don't know about this movie, some combination of the editing, narrative misfocus, Bully Girl just being allowed to hang around and be a heinous bitch to everyone, and then ending not even on the realization of the central relationship of the movie, but the main character cheesily weeping into his arms because he finally decided to listen to what other people may or may not being saying behind his back?

Man, there was a lot of potential here, but I feel like I only got glimpses of it.