The film marks the feature-length directorial and screenwriting debut of actor Joseph Millson. His deep roots in theatre proved crucial: drawing from the stage — especially in the precision of performance — Millson brought theatrical rigor to the set of his first film.

On its surface, Signs of Life is a romantic drama about the meeting of a man and a woman under ordinary and strange circumstances. But that’s only the beginning.

It’s very much a low-budget production — at the Q&A following the Genesis premiere, Millson shared how the crew was built from friends and loved ones, and how they pinched every pound. But this is one of those rare cases where more money would have added nothing. The film is visually beautiful and meticulously composed, attentive to the smallest elements that appear in the frame (and as any theatre artist knows — on stage or on screen, every detail carries meaning).

“Signs of Life” is a rigorously restrained film — there are no deliberately gut-punching moments, no fights, no crashes, none of the usual devices designed to shock the viewer on a visceral, reptilian level.

The shots are long. The camera watches faces intently, even mercilessly — performances are rendered through the flutter of an eyelash. In such intimate framing, there is nowhere to hide — no action sequences or plot twists to lean on.

In fact, the film is almost devoid of dramatic plot turns. Instead, its structure is built around the internal lives of its characters — emotions that simmer quietly (like the volcano glimpsed in one shot), occasionally releasing bursts of steam.

The dialogue is spare, Chekhovian — dropped like something forgotten. Characters eat, drink soda, adjust their jackets… while their lives crumble. Even these downfalls often happen off-screen. The camera turns on mid-beat, catching only the most ordinary moments: an airport routine, gravel under sneakers, a shattered bottle at the edge of a nameless road, a suitcase with a broken wheel.

And yet somehow, in frame, the mundane becomes poetic. The film’s delicate visual language is supported by a sensitive score from composer Anne Dudley.

Millson noted during the post-screening talk that the performances were choreographed tightly, down to each tilt of the head. The lead character, Anne (Sarah-Jane Potts), is literally speechless — whether she never spoke or lost her voice to trauma is left unsaid. That silence makes both her performance and our viewing experience all the more intense. We read her thoughts, her emotions, her entire being through her eyes and micro-expressions. The psychological effort draws us into immediate identification with the character.

We know almost nothing about the characters — just names and scraps of context. And yet, during the film, we invent their histories, imagine their tragedies, populate their pasts. Bill — the film’s other lead — is pure Chekhov, brought to life by David Galby, who, incidentally, played Simeonov-Pischik in The Cherry Orchard under Benedict Andrews at the Donmar Warehouse — one of Chekhov’s most complex and contradictory roles.

This Bill feels like a grown-up Pierrot — he’s wiped the makeup from his face but forgotten to shed the costume of a clumsy, soft-hearted fool. He jogs in the mornings but freezes when it really matters.

The film shares a title with Werner Herzog’s tragicomedy and echoes Achim von Arnim’s novella “The Possessed Invalid at Fort Ratonneau.” Not so much in content as in spirit — with ancient themes of sea and sorrow, vinegar and oil, things that never quite mix. And of course, the appearance of a mysterious woman who saves a grieving man from a fire — though in Millson’s case, the blaze is emotional, not physical.

Another parallel might be William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker, based on the life of Helen Keller. In that story, teacher Anne Sullivan reaches a deaf-blind girl who has been driven to madness by despair. In Millson’s film, a silent woman named Anne (surely not a coincidence) searches for a way back — to herself and to the world. Her task is to perform a miracle, and the effort is entirely internal. Her despair, displacement, poverty, grief — all push her to act. But the labor of healing happens invisibly, beneath the skin.

Here, silence becomes a trope, a symbol that elevates the story beyond realism into parable.
This Signs of Life is, from the first frame to the last, a parable.

The urn of ashes Anne carries in her backpack, unable to part with its contents, is of course a real tragedy — the grief of a real woman, with her short-cropped hair, her brave little nose, her tender mouth folded in sorrow, her neck frozen in grief. But the urn is also a symbol, the point of origin for the film’s metaphor. It is the weight of loss, the shape of absence. Into it, you may pour any ashes of your own — a divorce, a death, a war, the loss of home or of language.

Shall I tell you what silence feels like to an immigrant, for whom language was once not just a tool, but a way of touching the world? No — countless pages have already tried. But a parable… a parable can say it better than volumes ever could.

The film is filled with awkward, funny moments of real life — a shirt riding up on a very normal belly (not sculpted like a Polykleitos – but human and real), a failed ping-pong serve, a shard of glass in the heel of a goblin-like creep. These moments don’t feel naïve. That’s the wrong word. They feel honest, deeply and disarmingly so.

The screenwriting also deserves note — the emotional arc is crafted with mathematical precision, like a sine wave: a chuckle trailing into a sob. And the ending? To describe it would be to spoil it. It’s domestic and luminous, poetic and romantic.

Sincere, poetic cinema is itself a miracle — a true sign of life. In the von Arnim novella referenced above, a man tells the woman:
“You smell like the fire of Troy.”

And in this film, the urn of ashes — at first the remains of a great fire — slowly transforms. By the end, it no longer holds tragedy, but the light and warmth of home.