Berberian Sound Studio: La inquisición del sonido

First and foremost it has to be recognised that the design and execution of the sound sequences in this film are outstanding. It's almost worth ninety minutes of your time just to listen to this film, the sound design is so good. It's also pretty satisfying if you have a fetish for old sound equipment – all those reel-to-reel tape decks and retro-futuristic signal generators and so on. From that point of view and from the sound perspective this film was absolutely up my street. Toby Jones as the lead could not be faulted and I would happily watch anything with him in it.

So what was wrong with it? Well it was sub-Lynchian without ever coming near to the pleasures and terrors of an actual David Lynch film. You can almost hear the director straining to hit the tone of a Lynch film and falling badly short every time. The script was at times very amusing but mostly it was just plain trivial or superficial. The story was incomprehensible, again not in a Lynch fashion where the very incomprehensibility adds to the mystery but in the fashion of someone striving for portentous but merely achieving pretentious.

It's worth seeing/hearing for the fantastic design but as a film it fails to engage and it fails to be half as clever as it thinks it is.

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.

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.

There is a pressure associated with watching a film considered one of the best of its year; there is of course pressure on the film to live up to the hype but when it comes to smaller films such as this one then there is a certain amount of pressure on the viewer to be part of the people who "get it" and not one of the dullards who should just stick to blockbusters. Of course this is message board talk but it exists in the mind too and for sure I came to this film wanting to come out praising it. Indeed I felt this to the point that even as it ended I felt like I should have enjoyed it more and thus started to rationalize myself towards that position, but it isn't the case because while I appreciated aspects of this film, generally I found it pretty dull and lacking a sharp edge.

The plot is that a British sound engineer comes to Italy for a project and finds himself doing ADR and Foley for a film containing a lot of graphic violence; as he works he finds his grip on his sense slipping, with his days spent not understanding what is being said around him and acting out violent acts on vegetables while watching women be brutalized on film over and over again. The concept I am fine with and I liked the ideas in the plot of exposure to this material having an impact and I even enjoyed the slow burn of the horror, but it slow burnt its whole way to the end and really didn't deliver too much. It has some nice touches as the plot develops but the "inside a movie" thing feels trite and isn't developed enough here to stand up on its own. I was drawn into the built but then surprised by how little delivery there was at the other end.

Of course the one thing the film does great is the sound engineering. As my partner was studying upstairs, I watched this through a very good set of headphones and it added a lot to the film to be so immersed in the audio aspect. The violence of the sounds and the persistence of them is very engaging and involving, just as it is for the main character, although the screaming gets very old very quickly. The decision to have the majority of the dialogue in Italian without subtitles was an interesting one which cuts both ways; on one hand it disorientates the viewer as it does the main character, but then it does put more pressure on the feel of the film – which then doesn't deliver. The cast are solid, with Jones in good form throughout.

I did want to like it more than I did but while the sound and the slow burn pacing is engaging, it goes on too long and doesn't have enough in the way of development of delivery to really payoff at the end. Trust me, I wanted to go with the majority on this and be seen as one of the cool kids, but it really only worked for me up to a point.

Man alive, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is a strange little film. It stars the hapless Toby Jones as a mild-mannered sound engineer who travels to Rome to work on the soundtrack of a sinister giallo film and soon finds himself getting sucked into the movie's mystique and repellent atmosphere.

Technically, this film is a gem, with excellent sound design and good visuals; for a film set almost entirely in a sound studio, it's atmospheric and engaging, and it helps that the underrated Jones gives an excellent turn in a rare leading role. The problem with BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, then, is that it's one of those 'style over substance' movies where there's very little meat behind what's up on screen.

This feels almost like one of those films that's made up as it goes along. It starts off strongly, with a decent first half hour setting up the story, and what follows is oddly disturbing despite a lack of explicitness. However, around the halfway mark it starts to get heavy going, and the ending is particularly disappointing, failing to tie up or rationalise what's happened. I hate it when a film reaches this level of ambiguity; a bit of ambiguity works fine, but to this degree it's just a cop out, unfortunately.