Berberian Sound Studio

With their eye-popping visuals, grotesque surrealism, and time-capsule weirdness, it’s no wonder giallo movies have, since their arrival in 1960s Italy, appealed to audiences who crave a dash of sleaze along with their mad poetry. Combustible mixtures of Grand Guignol horror, pulp storytelling, and all-out visual and aural hallucination, gialli—at their demented best, as in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963) and Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980)—truly resembled waking nightmares, awash in impossibly bright colors and disorienting soundtracks filled with off-kilter post-dubbing and delirious musical scores. It’s an equally appealing genre for filmmakers, who are given practically free reign to overindulge themselves in the stylistic jigsaw-puzzle of cinema. 

This baroque extravagance has spawned cinematic imitators over the last half-century, one notable example being Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Amer (2009)—a riddle of a movie that approaches giallo with one part intellectual reflexivity and one part dazzled emulation. While Amer stresses the psychosexual symbolism of this peculiar subgenre, Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio honors (and dismantles) its formal composition, focusing much of its deconstruction on the aural components too often undervalued in cinema. Resembling, at times, a Lynchian remake of Blow-Out (1981), Berberian Sound Studio follows a timid British sound engineer (his forte is the soothing ambience of nature documentaries) to an Italian sound studio finishing post-production on its latest giallo provocation. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), our hapless soundman, is mysteriously invited by a pompous auteur named Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancino) to finish scoring The Equestrian Vortex, a seemingly brutal horror film (though Santini would never admit as much). The grisly sonic universe that Gilderoy reticently enters soon destroys his ability to distinguish reality from illusion, causing the real world and The Equestrian Vortex to bleed into each other. The nightmarish film-within-a-film that encroaches upon reality is a tired, self-reflexive gimmick in surrealist cinema, but it’s made slightly fresher by Berberian Sound Studio.

The Equestrian Vortex truly sounds like a sadistic horror show, but we are never (perhaps thankfully) allowed access to its images, aside from its striking opening credits. With taunting wit, the movie constantly threatens to unleash giallo’s most controversial aspect—its graphic violence—yet shows us only sound designers smashing melons and scalping radishes to accompany the horrors that go unseen. That might seem to let squeamish viewers off the hook, but one of Berberian Sound Studio’s cleverest ploys is to make us realize how much more terrifying our mental image is than explicit portrayal: it turns out the sound of a body slamming into concrete is more unsettling than the image.

This visceral response to gruesome subject matter, whether visualized or not, suggests movies as a kind of temporary insanity—something like a cerebral hemorrhage. Berberian Sound Studio’s emphasis on the formal construction of cinema should make us realize, along with Gilderoy, that such unwatchable horrors are optical and aural illusions, tricks manipulating reality; yet Gilderoy (and presumably the audience) are repulsed by the bloodshed obliquely witnessed, either despite or because of its blatant unreality.

As someone who tinkers obsessively with analog tape recorders, who can create the eerie whistle of a UFO with a lightbulb and steel wire, Gilderoy provides the perfect opportunity to expose the aural construct of cinema like a raw nerve.  The disturbed soundman, both appalled and entranced by the cruelty of The Equestrian Vortex, loses his grip on reality and drifts into some kind of parallel world that coalesces in his head; and it’s here that the movie leaves us, increasingly lost in its own dementia, with a perplexed Gilderoy beholding a ghostly speck of light as the creator of the universe.

Jones offers a witty, dexterous performance as Gilderoy, but even so the movie conveys a dizzying sense of madness more ably than it evokes believable characters. In a sense, Berberian Sound Studio paints itself into a corner: for two-thirds of its running time it approaches the outer gates of haunting surrealism, but once it enters that foreboding territory it has nowhere else to go. The climax is a series of menacing episodes that are astounding to watch but, though beautifully staged, they can only follow one another in succession until the movie runs out of mind-boggling ideas.  Surrealist disintegration is a tricky narrative conceit, and Berberian Sound Studio can't achieve the same intense emotion, dynamic characters, or lunatic beauty of a pinnacle such as Mulholland Drive (which Berberian Sound Studio alludes to by occasionally splaying the word “Silenzio” across the screen in blood-red letters).

But if Berberian Sound Studio ultimately fails to resonate, that shouldn’t disparage Strickland’s incredible achievement as an innovative stylist. In only his second feature (after 2009's Katalin Varga), Strickland demonstrates a bold willingness to experiment and an intimate knowledge of manipulating film form. One scene in which voice actress Katalin Ladik overdubs a demonic witch reaping vengeance on her tormentors is inexpressibly frightening—not only because of the hideous sound effects, but also because of the dagger-like shards of neon light and aggressive framing by cinematographer Nic Knowland. An ominous musical score by the band Broadcast accompanies a subtle yet meticulous soundscape, allowing the intricacy of Gilderoy’s sonic world to reveal itself slowly to the audience. Even Strickland’s few concessions to outright giallo-tribute are masterfully done, most notably an abrupt cut from grim violence to a placid pastoral scene that recalls a similarly baffling edit in one of Argento’s most underrated concoctions, Opera (1987).

If Berberian Sound Studio loses its footing in the final third, it clearly demonstrates Strickland’s burgeoning confidence as a filmmaker. Not to mention his sly sense of humor: when the sights and sounds provided by movies can so insidiously infest our minds, then watching—and listening—to their dream reality always entails an invitation to madness.  

Originally published by Joyless Creatures (December 12, 2013).

Berberian Sound Studio

Grade: B+

Runtime: 92m.
Country: UK
Premiere: June 28, 2012 (Edinburgh Film Festival)
US Premiere: ​June 14, 2013 

Director: Peter Strickland
Producers: Mary Burke, Keith Griffiths
Writer: Peter Strickland
Music: Broadcast
Cinematography: Nic Knowland
Editor: Charles Dickens
Cast: Toby Jones, Cosimo Fusco, Antonio Mancino, Fatma Mohamed, Salvatore Li Causi, Chiara D'Anna, Tonia Sotiropoulou, Eugenia Caruso, Susanna Cappellaro, Guido Adorni, Lara Parmiani, Jozef Cseres