![]() And he dreams of rural British landscapes and of the nature documentaries he’d rather be making. Our hero is a quiet little sort, the kind who spends his free time reading adoring letters from his mum giving him an update on some chicks hatching back home. Director Peter Strickland is more interested in using sound to establish Gilderoy’s general sense of unease and displacement, and then turning that into its own kind of slowly gathering terror. That doesn’t sound like much of a story, and it isn’t. We also see a bit of the behind-the-scenes drama: Gilderoy becomes close with an actress who has had some kind of affair with the director, and he ticks off the irritable producer whenever he complains about malfunctioning equipment or asks to be reimbursed for his expenses. We definitely hear the movie, though, and we see how sound is created: Water dabbed on sizzling pans melons hacked to pieces eggplants and other nightshades smushed to a gory pulp even, at one point, a lightbulb dragged across a metal rake. He’s creating sound effects for a goofy little number full of witches and nubile females called The Equestrian Vortex, which we never actually see. The protagonist is Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a mousy, repressed sound engineer/Foley artist from rural England who comes to Italy sometime in the seventies to work in a drab post-production studio. But those with a flair for the offbeat might find themselves unnerved and riveted. Horror fiends looking for cheap thrills may be disappointed. There are no bad guys, and no real violence. On a simple level, it’s an homage to the great, artfully schlocky Italian giallo horror flicks of the seventies (films with evocatively ridiculous names like Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Iguana With the Tongue of Fire, and my all-time favorite title, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key), but it’s a bloodless, corpseless one. But it’s hard to say what, exactly, it is. ![]() And for much of its running time, it’s also one of the most beautiful. Berberian Sound Studio is one of the strangest films you’ll see this year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |