Berberian Sound Studio

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.

This film is a pleasant homage to Italian giallo and to the under-recognized art of sound editing. A bit like Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's "Amer" did, but in a more conventional, more "easy watching" way.

It begins as an amusing comedy with a cast of characters gently mocking the 70's Italian machismo. The very exciting central concept of the film is to deal with graphical horror without showing any real violence on the screen. This counter-fashion idea clearly marks its distance from the recent escalation in the graphic horror genre cinema, which I find honorable.

The imagination of the spectator is highly put to use compared to these days' standards. A truly outstanding atmosphere is obtained thanks to a really terrific sound editing. The atmosphere moves from light fun to disturbing fantasy with elegance.

But near the end, the story lost me. I eventually didn't understand where the film wanted take me. For that disappointing feeling, I don't rate it very high, but this movie is definitely a good piece of artwork and is more interesting than most of what is to be seen nowadays.

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.

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.

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.