When her spiritualist mother is mysteriously murdered, sound engineer Charlotte (Emilie Dequenne) travels to her mother's country home where she had been giving tarot card readings. Charlotte discovers that some of the townspeople thought her mother was a witch. While recording sounds of the house settling, Charlotte's recorder starts picking up sounds and voices from the past - including her own - and she discovers that people who claimed not to know her mother were in fact her clients (including the mayor's unfaithful wife, an industrialist under investigation, and an organic farmer that was her secret lover, a couple dismayed and angered when she tells them that their missing son is dead, the slow neighbor boy with a crush on her, and a younger farmer who was having a relationship with her) and one of them might be her killer. Charlotte starts to plot out the positions of the speakers and finds out when they visited as she comes closer to hearing the murder but the same person or persons who silenced her mother may be after her.

While it lacks the shock value of some of the more overrated French horror imports like HIGH TENSION, ILS (THEM), MARTYRS, and A L'INTERIEUR and would seem to fit in more comfortably with the more refined brand of French thrillers like THE PAGE TURNER, L'HUMANITE, and anything by Claude Chabrol, ECOUTE LE TEMPS does suffer from being a little too ambiguous at times. Although annoyed with her mother's supposed mediumistic powers, she never questions the cause of her ability to hear the past and charges right into her investigation. With all of the suspects set up as such right from the get-go, the seasoned viewer knows that the killer will turn out to be someone with more obscure motives. The symbolism is a bit heavy-handed (the bookending stags and the house which starts to literally come down around Charlotte quite suddenly during the mildest of rainstorms as she races to hear the murder). That said, at 83 minutes, it is a pleasant diversion with attractive cinematography, an odd music score (the song "Going to Everglades" is used over the opening and closing credits although it is never explained why Charlotte's mother listens to it constantly), and an attractive lead.