“The Listeners,” premiering Friday on Starz, unusually began as a story written by Jordan Tannahill as the basis for Missy Mazzoli’s 2022 opera, also called “The Listeners” (libre by Royce Vavrek), which he turned into a 2021 novel, which became a 2024 BBC television series, also written by Tannahill. Starz has split its original four episodes into five, meaning they end in strange places, but given its glacial, controlled pacing, shorter might be better.
Tannahill's inspiration is an unexplained phenomenon reported in the real world (although exactly how real it is is open to interpretation) usually called “the hum”, where people experience a low but persistent background noise inaudible to others. (It is not tinnitus or any diagnosable medical condition.) One of those victims is Claire (Rebecca Hall), a high school literature teacher with a husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah), and a teenage daughter, Ashley (Mia Tharia), with whom she gets along well. We start on a positive note, Claire and Ashley singing Richard and Linda Thompson's “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” as they drive to school (she also has Nick Drake on her phone). And then the British folk rock of the 70s gives way to a less pleasant listening landscape, as the ringing appears, causing headaches and nosebleeds and affecting your concentration and your mood, your job and your family.
Any condition can isolate those who don't share it, and Claire feels some relief when a student, Kyle (Ollie West), approaches her and listens too. They go to investigate possible sources of the sound (wind turbines, a radio telescope) and eventually end up in something like a support group for hum listeners run by Omar (Amr Waked) and Jo (Gayle Rankin). There are some sketchy aspects to their past, including a change of identity, and they like to keep the group in check, but the breathing exercises and visualizations seem pretty standard and more benign than, say, Scientology, and the suggestion that one can tame an affliction by embracing it is quite reasonable. Claire's mistake here is not getting signed parental permission, so to speak, or recruiting a chaperone, and her growing closeness to Kyle (not romantic, not sexual, we're sure) will cause problems for them, cost Claire her job, and ruin her marriage. She makes some insufficiently careful decisions, but those around her tend to overreact. This is very much a story about listening and not listening.
Directed by Janicza Bravo and thoughtfully photographed by Jody Lee Lipes, it has the studied look and pace of a 20th century art film. (Always nice to see.) I was reminded of Antonioni's “Red Desert” and Bergman's “Persona,” psychological studies of women falling apart, but also, thematically, of Spielberg's “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” with its characters driven into what appears to be a frenzy by private ether bulletins, taking them away from family and toward others who are receiving the same message. There are no aliens here, it's not a spoiler, although I might have liked that ending more than this one, which in its own way seems to fall from space.
You can look for metaphors and social commentary here (there are references to conspiracy theories and industrial noise pollution and the like), but I find it works more effectively as a beautifully played mood piece and character study and, certainly in the case of Hall, whose story this is, a platform for some exquisitely subtle performance.
