Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Directed by Peter Strickland
In the 1970s, a British sound technician is brought to Italy to work on the sound effects for a gruesome horror film. His nightmarish task slowly takes over his psyche, driving him to confront his own past.
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What critics say influenced Berberian Sound Studio
As a psychological thriller, Berberian Sound Studio is often hypnotic, but it’s also a little one-note: About halfway through its slim running time, the film begins to repeat itself, offering only minor variations on its Blow Out-meets-Suspiria metholodogy.
Berberian Sound Studio has some of the vibe of DePalma's Blow Out (1981).
It’s tough to recall a thriller this obsessed with cinematic sound design outside of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, and it’s this seldom-discussed aspect of the filmmaking craft that makes Berberian Sound Studio such a strange but satisfying curiosity.
There was Brian De Palma's "Blow Out," which followed a movie sound recordist, and one could argue the case of "Singin' In The Rain," but perhaps none have gone into more depth than Peter Strickland's "Berberian Sound Studio," set almost entirely within the Italian post house of the title, and the British director's follow-up to his excellent 2009 Hungarian-language debut "Katalin Varga."
A sly variation on Brian De Palma's Blow Out by way of Peeping Tom, this barbed call out to Italian exploitation thrillers of the ’70s will be best appreciated by moviegoers familiar with the term "giallo”; others will find its dense web of allusions to real films of the period confounding.
Indeed, Strickland references both Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” in a hallucinatory scene in which the haunted sound studio shows Gilderoy a film of himself getting out of bed, shot only seconds earlier, which then catches in the projector, burns and disintegrates, destroying the wall that protects his work from his life.
Eventually, he finds himself going mad and then something really nifty happens on screen that I don't feel like spoiling, but it reminded me quite a bit of Ingmar Bergman's Persona .
By the end Berberian Sound Studio dives right off the deep end with a moment similar to Bergman’s Persona , but its abrupt ending doesn’t make for a conclusion that’s too fulfilling.
Strickland obviously hasn't invented this approach, and Berberian Sound Studio bears a great resemblance to certain H.P. Lovecraft stories as well as, explicitly, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation , and not just because both movies follow isolated heroes who go about endlessly tinkering with audio effects.
In Francis Coppola's The Conversation (1974), Gene Hackman played a San Francisco surveillance expert hired to make secret recordings of conspiratorial lovers, who gets out of his depth and descends into paranoia.
Here, as in The Exorcist, The Conversation, Blow Out and Écoute le Temps , acoustics – and the ambiguities associated with them – will come to the fore, as sound engineer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) mixes the ADR, foley work and musical score for a brutal and clearly misogynistic film (‘The Equestrian Vortex’) that we constantly hear but almost never see – even if the garish black-and-red opening credits to this film-within-a-film replace Berberian Sound Studio‘s own title sequence.
It will remind you of other movies – THE CONVERSATION meets a psychological meltdown meets the making of SUSPIRIA or maybe an Italian witch horror movie so wacky it was never seen in the U.S. – but you haven’t seen anything else really like it.
Vocal performance artists (Suzy Kendall, "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage," "Torso" and Jean-Michael van Schouwburg) arrive to give voice to inhuman sounds.
"Blood and Black Lace." "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage."
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It all sounds ridiculous, but Strickland knows how to use his camera: The imagery is somehow both sensuous and gruesome, which is the precise balancing act that the best giallo films — think Dario Argento’s Deep Red, or Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace — also manage to pull off.
Indeed, Strickland references both Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” in a hallucinatory scene in which the haunted sound studio shows Gilderoy a film of himself getting out of bed, shot only seconds earlier, which then catches in the projector, burns and disintegrates, destroying the wall that protects his work from his life.
Like “Eraserhead” or “Inland Empire,” there are times when the film simply defies interpretation.
Gradually, as surrealistic “Barton Fink”- or even “Eraserhead”-like touches come in, the engineer’s imagination and the horror film start to blend together.
Vocal performance artists (Suzy Kendall, "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage," "Torso" and Jean-Michael van Schouwburg) arrive to give voice to inhuman sounds.
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As a psychological thriller, Berberian Sound Studio is often hypnotic, but it’s also a little one-note: About halfway through its slim running time, the film begins to repeat itself, offering only minor variations on its Blow Out-meets-Suspiria metholodogy.
"Berberian Sound Studio" is a very peculiar movie, honestly — as if someone took all the raw footage from Argento's "Suspiria," and gave it to Antonioni to recut.
He doesn't much care for the movie either; though what he thought "The Equestrian Vortex" was about is never explored, it's instantly clear that he never imagined it would be a cross between Dario Argento's baroque Suspiria, in which ballet students endure supernatural torments at a haunted boarding school, and the German witch-hunt shocker Mark of the Devil, grandfather of all torture-porn.
Like Suzy Bannion in “Suspiria,” Gilderoy is a fish out of water tortured by his surroundings.
Like the heroines of the Suspiria -like film he is working on, Gilderoy is lost in an environment that he does not fully comprehend.
Restored blu-rays of Dario Argento and Mario Bava’s films are inviting renewed considerations of the genre outside the canonized Suspiria, and Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Amer presented a dedicated contemporary revisitation of the genre.
It all sounds ridiculous, but Strickland knows how to use his camera: The imagery is somehow both sensuous and gruesome, which is the precise balancing act that the best giallo films — think Dario Argento’s Deep Red, or Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace — also manage to pull off.
"Blood and Black Lace." "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage."