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Cast: Sarah Polley (Hanna), Tim Robbins (Josef)
Written and directed by: Isabel Coixet
Release date:December 2006

Words, language. They transform our thoughts and feelings into something tangible yet abstract. They create meaning through the act of being. Or not being. Once in a while, they communicate through their very absence, memories unspeakable. This is a movie about silence treasured and protected, about lonleliness, being alone in the midst of a crowd. About the fear of opening the door to that closed room in the mind, which you know if opened would pull you into its darkness for ever.

After a short prologue, depicting an accident aboard an oil rig, the movie opens with Hanna, a young woman going about her work in a factory. Her face is blank, without the slightest trace of any emotion or feeling. She doesn’t talk, doesn’t smile. She keeps off her hearing aid most of the time. To avoid having to listen. During lunch, she takes out a tupperware box and eats rice, fried chicken and a slice of apple, slowly and thoroughly. But without any apparent pleasure. After work, the manager calls her into his office and orders her to take a month’s holiday. Her co-workers have been complaining as she hasn’t taken a day off in her four years at the place. She packs up her bags and goes off to some small seaside town. In a restaurant, she overhears a guy searching for a nurse. Hanna volunteers. She if flown to the oil-rig. A mechanical monstrosity standing right in the middle of the vast ocean. Hanna has to take care of Josef, who suffered severe burns in the accident, till he can be transported to the shore.

Josef has lost his eyesight temporarily. Confined in a bed, starved of human contact, he reaches out to the new nurse. He flirts with her, jokes around, tries to get to know her. However, he can’t even get her name.

Life on the rig has its own rythms. Each person has devised his own means to adapt. For instance, Simon, the cook, tries out exotic cuisines from different geographies every day, putting on the music from that region while he cooks. The others just want burgers and steaks. But Simon has to cook whatever he does. There’s a young scientist, who spends his time shooting hoops and measuring the waves. As an elderly worker remarks to Hanna while standing on the dock and looking into the horizon, there’s one thing common to most of the residents. They like to be left alone. That’s why they are there. Probably they are all hurt and the only medicine is solitude.

Without realizing it Hanna gets closer to Josef, who has wounds far deeper than his burns. She repeatedly listens to a message left on Josef’s phone by a woman imploring him to call her back. We see Hanna lowering her defenses reluctantly, terrified of the consequences. Towards, the end there is wrenching monolgue, a tale of sorrow and suffering beyond imagination, when Hanna opens up to Josef literally and figuratively.

This is a slow and subtle, but imperfect movie. The child-like voice-over doesn’t work at times. And some people might feel that spending two hours for ten minutes of powerful revelation is not worth it. But the movie is not about the one big whoa moment. It’s a story of how some wounds are never meant to heal and how people manage to accept it and continue with their haunted lives.