Some Voices

Auditory hallucination, or hearing voices - considered to be, of symptoms, the sine qua non of paranoid schizophrenia - has been the subject of debate in the field of psychiatry. Might it not be better in the less extreme cases for the patient simply to live with the voices, even enter into some kind of dialogue with them, an existential anxiety management which might even generate, as a by-product, a kind of poetry of the self?

Risky, certainly, but might that not be better than the liquid cosh: the pharmacological equivalent of the sledgehammer to the back of the head? The function of which can only ever be zombifying, institutionalising, and along with its side-effects guaranteed in the end to make the patient - as the technical phrase has it - barking mad?

Into this human and clinical debate steps Some Voices. This is a serious, substantial, and compassionate movie which demands to be seen, not least for its outstanding performances from an excellent cast, including Kelly Macdonald, David Morrissey and especially Daniel Craig as Ray, the vulnerable and gentle soul suffering from schizophrenia: a performance if anything even more impressive than the one he gave in William Boyd's The Trench.

The stage origins of Joe Penhall's screenplay (Some Voices is originally a theatre production for the Royal Court) are evident only in its honest attention to ideas and its discursive sense of how consciousness is modified by this condition. We first see Ray on his discharge from some grim facility of high-backed peeling easy chairs, dire corridors and a TV room with a TV that doesn't work. For the rest of the film, poor television reception is to function as a grim metaphor for how Ray sees the world and how the world sees him.

He is picked up by Pete (David Morrissey), Ray's long-suffering brother, who is now running a cafe in West London that he bought out from their late father. With a mixture of love, exasperation and the traditional resentment of the responsible family member who has to keep the show on the road, Pete puts Ray up at his place.

But they argue about Ray's medication. Pete bullies and chivvies Ray into taking it; Ray resents and fears the way it makes him feel half dead. By secretly giving it a miss, Ray unlocks his own capacity for good-natured high spirits, for joie de vivre, in which his condition plays its own unacknowledged role, and also for human contact. When he sees Laura (Kelly Macdonald) being threatened by her boyfriend, he intervenes, gets a Glasgow kiss for his pains, but with a strange delicacy and intuition starts a relationship with Laura.

Their love affair is coloured and shaped by his schizophrenia, which in turn is kept under control, not by drugs, but by the analgesic and redemptive properties of love. Furthermore, his condition creates within Ray a genial sense of rapture and reverence, particularly in his ecstatic, childlike response to swirly round shapes: like the crop circles Ray and Laura see on the train on their day trip to Hastings, and the huge catherine-wheel firework he nicks from a beachfront shop.

It is this shape that recurs when Ray has one of his many breakdowns, going out stark naked into the Uxbridge Road and painting a huge spiral shape on the pavement with tinned tomatoes: an episode replete with dark, helpless comedy.

Nothing could be more tiresome and dishonest than shopworn RD Laing-style cliches about schizophrenia being a heightened visionary state which the western world crushes under the jackboot of its dull rationalist enlightenment. Such a proposition would not correspond to the actual experience of schizophrenia sufferers and their carers; in real life, schizophrenia can lead to a lifelong trial of stress and unhappiness, and Some Voices reflects this.

But the film is admirable in the way it avoids other cliches too: the schizophrenic is not demonised as a potential criminal or as a care-in-the-community basket-case. Ray's essential humanity is transcribed with sympathy and warmth, and so is the patience and perseverance of Pete, who must shoulder most of the burden of schizophrenia's terrible mystery.

Director Simon Cellan-Jones is a newcomer to feature-films, having amassed a track record in heavyweight television work; his direction is assured and sensitive, resulting in a very strong if occasionally strident British film, adapting the very best traditions of stage and television drama for the big screen. And tribute is owed, too, to Richard Flynn's sound mix, reproducing the dense texture of the voices and the music in Ray's mind.

This film is accompanied by a short, Bring Me Your Love, which David Morrissey directs, and it is a film with a similar theme, dealing with mental illness - but with a short film's emphasis on irony and paradox. Ian Hart is a sucessful, faintly louche newspaper columnist visiting his wife, Saira Todd, in a some kind of residential care. She frenziedly accuses him of sleeping with other women; he gloomily notes that this is the kind of paranoia that got her here in the first place. The end twist clicks into place in a satisfying, if slightly predictable way.