The Whisperers is about a profoundly lonely and deluded old woman Mrs. Ross (Edith Evans), who lives in a shabby flat stuffed with old bottles and newspapers. She's paranoid and imagines she hears voices and is obsessed with the sounds that come from the flat of the interracial couple that live upstairs. She has a rich fantasy life where she imagines she is a bishop's daughter waiting for her father's inheritance. Her sleazy son Charlie comes by and hides some stolen loot in her apartment. She finds the money and is thunderstruck, convinced that the money is indeed her long lost inheritance. Unfortunately, she boasts about it to the wrong person and is robbed and left for dead. After a slow recovery, Social Services manages to contact her husband Archie and reunite them. Her husband is grifter, forced for once in his life to be responsible. She returns to her tidied-up flat. She's looked after, but she's robbed of the paranoia and fantasies that she used to dignify her impoverished life. Archie steals money from her handbag and gaslights her into thinking she lost it. Archie doesn't stick around for long, so in the end she's back to her usual solitary life of fantasizing and hoarding, but it's more nourishing than her depressing life with Archie. And she does have a social safety net that is more than most older Americans have today. A kindly clerk at the welfare office, Mr. Conrad (Douglas Sim) cares about her personally and is, in a way, the son she never had. As the other reviewers have pointed out, the film is filled with melodramatic cops and robbers plot elements that detract from the engrossing story of this aging woman. Edith Evan's acting is extraordinary. Highly recommended.
Review of The Whisperers
