At the mixing desk, he is part high priest, part human sacrifice in the black mass of cinema production.īerberian Sound Studio has something of early Lynch and Polanski, and the nasty, secretive studio is a little like the tortured Mark Lewis’s screening room in Powell’s Peeping Tom, but that gives no real idea of how boldly individual this film is. Slowly, he becomes immersed in the pure sensual horror of sound: the screams, the scrapes, the clunks and clicks, the sudden electro stabs, the dusty silences that bring out his inner fears. But how on earth has he got this job? Gilderoy is certainly a whiz at creating new effects, but that might not be the only reason he was hired. (Sadly, however, despite the title, no one gets the coconut halves out.) Gilderoy is confronted with the film’s dyspeptic producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco) and the elegant and sinister director Santini (Antonio Mancino), and Gilderoy baffles and irritates everyone with his maladroit Englishness and nerdy insistence on being reimbursed for his expenses, an issue which is ultimately to raise unexpected questions. In the studio itself, bored guys aurally simulate human atrocity by whacking and stabbing vegetables, while female stars give operatic screams in the sound booth. Lonely, homesick Gilderoy finds himself working on an explicit horror called The Equestrian Vortex. With its nasty corridors and distant, repeated and meaningless screams, the building is like a psychiatric hospital. This cheesy, crummy place provides the electronic music, sound effects and dialogue overdubbing on low-budget pulp shockers – the giallo genre made famous by Dario Argento: sex, violence and Satanism. These facilities are presumably in Rome, but there is to be no high-minded cinephile swooning over the history of Cinecittà and the like. Toby Jones plays a mousy sound engineer called Gilderoy from Dorking in the 1970s he has taken a job in a post-production studio in Italy, the Berberian sound studio of the title. It is seriously weird and seriously good. ![]() ![]() Arresting as it was, nothing in that movie could have given us any clue to this quite extraordinary followup: utterly distinctive and all but unclassifiable, a musique concrète nightmare, a psycho-metaphysical implosion of anxiety, with strange-tasting traces of black comedy and movie-buff riffs. Three years ago, British film-maker Peter Strickland grabbed us with his debut, Katalin Varga, an eerie revenge drama unfolding in the central European countryside.
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