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Innocent Voices Movie Review

Innocent Voices is a 2004 Salvadoran war film directed by Luis Mandoki and starring Carlos Padilla. It’s a flawed, but often quite effective war movie.

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“I’m the man of the house“

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A young boy, in an effort to have a normal childhood in 1980s El Salvador, is caught up in a dramatic fight for his life as he desperately tries to avoid the war which that is raging around him. This movie was made by a Mexican filmmaker with a cast consisting of actors hailing from many different countries from the Americas. But I consider it to be a Salvadoran movie as it is wholly about that country, in particular focusing on the horrendous civil war that they had to endure during the late 70s and 80s.

You don’t have to know much about this conflict to understand this film. In fact, the opposite was the case here as the movie desperately tried to be universally relatable and coherent to the point that it failed to properly depict this event. I did not learn a lot about it during the movie, which was a problem as this type of story should still function as a history lesson.

Another issue that Innocent Voices had is that overly familiar narrative of a child surviving the war and the war being depicted through the eyes of children. While that did lead to many scenes that were genuinely moving, the movie was also tonally imbalanced with the lighter, more childlike scenes contrasting too heavily with the burden of war.

With that being said, Carlos Padilla was very good in the main role and Chava felt like a classic cinema child character that was wonderfully developed and very likable. The family scenes were heartwarming and the movie made a strong anti-war message that opposed the very concept of child soldiers. It depicts just how easy it is for a child to be a soldier by just giving him a gun and teaching him how to use it, which is all the more reason that we should strive to ban it from ever happening.

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Innocent Voices is superbly crafted in terms of cinematography, score, directing and scope. The editing and pacing are also pretty good. It’s a very well made, frequently moving film that was still emotionally manipulative at times with a story that felt familiar and not authentic enough.