Till Human Voices Wake Us is a 2002 Australian drama film written and directed by Michael Petroni and starring Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter.

Sam's mother has died, and his stern father provides the young boy with little comfort or love, so his relationship with Silvy is all that matters to him.

She reads to him regularly out of her beloved poetry book, showing him a world of beauty and harmony within words that he comes to enjoy.

Twenty years later, 35-year-old Sam (Guy Pearce) is teaching psychology at a Melbourne institute when he must return to his hometown to bury his recently deceased father.

On the train, Sam briefly meets a pleasant woman who introduces herself as Ruby (Helena Bonham Carter).

Safe and warm in her old bed in her abandoned childhood home, Sam reads her the last few lines from her favorite poem, T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "Till human voices wake us, and we drown."