Berberian Sound Studio

I recall watching this in the cinema and enjoying it but a re-watch seemed to catch me unawares. Maybe it was the mood I was in but this time instead of being an interesting backroom take on my beloved gallo films it seemed a much more sinister affair. How could I not have noticed the first time how unpleasant it is, how nasty everyone seems to be and how alienating it all is? A powerful film, set almost exclusively in a sound studio, purportedly in Italy, though actually the nearby Three Mills Island set up. Almost everything I remember finding intriguing, this time took on a much more malevolent tone. The screaming ladies who can't get the right scream, the smashing of the vegetables, the switching between languages, the unfriendly 'friendly' intimacies, and the undertones of there being something rotten (apart from the decaying vegetables) within Italian society, at the time. A unique film but an uncomfortable watch.

This is a movie that seems to have no purpose. The way that the sound effects were generated in the film is mildly interesting, and the xenophobia that the main character experienced made me believe that the storyline would go somewhere. However, this was not the case. Sitting through this, I found it hard to understand why the actors were even drawn to the material; it is so uninteresting. Technically the film has its merits, and it might be relevant for someone who has worked as a sound effects technician and editor in movies, but for the general population it is probably a waste of time. I know that it contains references to Italian horror movies of the 70's and 80's, but so what? My advice is to stay away.

I have to admit. I only actually put this film on because of toby jones being in it. I alwaya enjoy seeing him in movies and felt this could be a charming movie. It was not and after viewing ill say it was not a great movie overall. So toby plays this man called gilderoy. He is a sound engineer and is hired by an italian company for a cryptic film called the equestrian vortex. A man that keeps himself to himself and I felt sort of sorry for him being around the italian who he could not completly understand. Things do get odd though as gilderoy relizes the sounds he is doing are more and more grotesque and weird. Its not a great movie. It was still entertaining and the cast were good. Overall an alright film but not particually horrifying.

I'm a big fan of films where impressionable protagonists enter a world of images and fictions. The challenge is how to model madness, by what degrees to confuse and clarify. DePalma could do this type of film, fooling with layered placement and identity of the eye—it'd be as cool as this and obvious in its main thrust about madness, but probably not as ambient. Lynch could in a more powerful way.

The story is that a shy sound-man goes to work on an Italian exploitation movie, this is to establish him as a creative person who will have to imagine things, and to establish the things he's going to imagine as of some darkness. He is an introvert, so we can have this conflation of inner and outer sensitivity to phenomena. Funny: shy is here equated with unattractive appearance in the main actor.

The film is entirely contained on a soundstage and around the studio where the soundtrack is being prepared. The actual horror movie is never seen (except for the opening credits which serve as the credits to our film), always inferred from what we see of the sound-carpet being fitted, the screams and slashing sounds, and this is a crucial point: the horror movie never quite materializes, so there's widespread negativity in reviews.

Oh, we get obvious hallucination in the latter stages that I could do without, linked to movie screens as borders of reality — it clarifies too much. But there's something else I liked, simple and inventive.

All sorts of sound effects are constructed over the course of the film before our eyes, from ordinary means: melons are slashed, pumpkins are splattered, broth is boiling. The first time we see the effect being recorded, and then an off-screen voice announces what it is supposed to be the sound of, and it's done a second time. It's fun to see on a fundamental level as exposing the kind of unceremonious but inventive technical work that takes place behind cinematic curtains of illusion.

But more marvelous is exemplifying the mechanism of that illusion that creates the imagined horror story in our mind — the second time the sound becomes the mental image just described to us. By making it so immediate, it's a powerful exhibit, observable in your own self, of the mind acquiring illusory images — the images become what the off- screen voice announces. Wickedly clever! Because it puts us in the protagonist's shoes, by introducing a disruptive level of imagination.

So I think you must see this at one point. Based on his previous film and now this, I have this filmmaker on my short list of talent that I expect he has it in him to be a leading voice a decade from now.

Having watched "In Fabric" from this director, before this previous (and more famous) incursion in the horror genre, it's easy to see a pattern: both in the homage to the greatest period of Italian horror films and in a kind of surrealistic and experimental narration (even more prominent in this film). But, in the same way that happened to me with "In Fabric", it doesn't completely reach me, even when I find the proposition incredibly attractive. Both movies are beautiful and kind of mesmerising, but the director also tends to feel self-absorbed in his own creation at times and lose focus. But it's a very different film and a love letter to the art of making movies.