I owe to those sessions the traumatic revelation of the power of sound to create mental images, even though the liner notes explained that the sinister sonics had been conjured in a studio by, for instance, a bloke setting about a cabbage with a hatchet. The opening cut? That old standard, “Execution and Torture,” including such perennial favorites as “Sawing Head Off,” “Red Hot Poker into Eye,” “Neck Twisted and Broken,” and “Burning at the Stake.” The purpose of the exercise was to freak ourselves out, and it worked a treat. Among the 40 or so recordings that the BBC released on Pye Records, there was one disc in particular that we listened to-or tried to listen to-over and over again: Vol. We’d draw the curtains, turn off the lights, and play sound-effects records. As a kid in the Seventies, I had a friend whose father was an art director at Pinewood Studios in southern England and I was a regular visitor to his home. In this era of cookie-cutter cinema, Strickland’s deeply personal moral and stylistic vision deserves the highest praise.I suppose I could be Berberian Sound Studio’s ideal viewer. From Jones’s twitchy, sympathetic-but-never-likeable central turn to Strickland’s dynamic use of sound and image, from the painstakingly drip-fed plot to a series of genuinely original shock moments, ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ is like nothing before – and whether or not it ‘works’ seems almost irrelevant. Of mild disappointment, even frustration.īut then, cast your mind back, and the film’s strengths reassert themselves. The effect is deflating, almost fatally so: as the credits roll, the feeling is one The film doubles back, loops and comes unglued, and the climax doesn’t have the freeform psychedelic impact that the director clearly craves. But from there on, Strickland’s Lynchian ambitions begin to cloud the issue. The claustrophobia of the setting – we (almost) never leave one tiny recording booth – and the multilayered use of sound make for a richly unfamiliar viewing experience, reaching a stunning climax in one moment of wholly unexpected and effective avant-garde wrongfooting: a horror-movie shock in full reverse. His conclusions may be oblique, but his methods – using sound effects and dialogue to create moments of discomfort – are remarkable. Strickland uses his set-up as a way to explore horror and the effect it can have on a sensitive soul, with particular focus on the sudden explosion of graphic images in the ’70s. The intensity of the project, coupled with a deep longing for home, begins to play havoc with his mental state.‘Berberian Sound Studio’ is, at heart, a cine-literate horror film, despite its complete lack of on-screen violence. A buttoned-down mother’s boy who works in his garden shed, Gilderoy is unprepared for the graphic scenes of torture he’s forced to witness. Toby Jones hits a career best as Gilderoy, an English sound recordist who, in the early 1970s, arrives at an Italian recording studio to work on the Foley track of a groundbreaking new horror picture. It’s always better to aim high and fall short. So if the film doesn’t quite scale the lofty peaks that writer-director Peter Strickland has set his sights on, it’s easy to forgive. There are scenes, sensations and (especially) sounds here that feel altogether new, strange and exciting. How do you measure success in cinema? ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ is a stylistically ambitious, morally radical, thematically complex work.
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