There are some things that defy and/or reject the use of words, some occurrences in life that just refuse to be caged within the frames of meaning and logic. Still, philosophers and writers stake their faith in words and its cathartic effects; Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that to "speak and express oneself is the best defense one has against the encroaching world." Hannah, in "The Secret Life of Words" would disagree -- her means of defense is to stay silent and closed, mindful of a flower bud buried under several feet of snow, unyielding and curled like an angry fist.
Hannah works in a factory somewhere in Britain and she leads a totally solitary existence. Every day she brings the same lunch of chicken, rice and apple. What she leaves over from lunch she eats for dinner. Her evenings are spent needle-pointing, which she trashes as soon as it's done. She has no furniture and seems to need no sleep. Sometimes she gets letters she doesn't open and and makes calls to the sender of those letters without uttering a single word.
Directed by Spain's Isabel Coixet ("My Life Without Me"), "The Secret" (partly based on the events of the Balkans War in the early 1990s) is a tale of enormous pain and sacrifice, and ultimately, of revival. There's nothing new in the underlying message and there's an occasional lapse into banal sentiment, but that takes nothing away from the fact that this is an extraordinarily moving work. As is Coixet's style, she stays close and intimate with her protagonist Hannah (portrayed with both guts and subtlety by Sarah Polley), never attempting to place her in any political guise. This is Hannah's story all the way, showing how she deals (or not) with unspeakable experiences and still finds the resources necessary to go on living.