Having greatly admired Peter Strickland’s debut feature, Katalin Varga, and been intrigued by the synopsis for this unusual follow-up I’m sad to say I left feeling a little disappointed by Berberian Sound Studio. It is undoubtedly clever and meticulously crafted but it is also frustratingly boring for large passages as it aimlessly shuffles towards a perplexing, but not all that interesting, climax.

Toby Jones stars as Gilderoy, a stuffy and uptight English sound engineer who is hired to edit the audio for a giallo horror film in Italy. Working in a claustrophobic and windowless studio (the studio of the title) the placid Englishman succumbs to the horrifying violence he is paid to work on. Although steeped in gialli references from…

Ever since I saw a review of it in Empire and Sight & Sound and was enticed by adverts for screenings of it at the fabulous Cornerhouse every time I went by on the 50 bus for a couple of weeks, I have been counting down the days until I saw Berberian Sound Studio.

It's odd, really. I've not seen Peter Strickland's previous film, Katalin Varga. I'm not especially knowledgeable about Toby Jones' work. Plus, I'm not someone who has a massive amount of background knowledge about giallo and Italian horror films. So as I started to watch it, I was trying to figure out exactly what about it had pulled me in to wanting to see it as much as…

"Sound is alchemy." -Peter Strickland, director/writer.

For the longest time there was so much praise given to the French film Amer which is supposedly a homage to gialli of the 1970s (specifically the third segment). What Amer attempted aesthetically, Berberian Sound Studio achieved audibly AND aesthetically.

"The world of sound awaits you."

Really, it goes without saying that I have a strong connection with Italian gialli and horror cinema. In ways, sometimes it feels as though it is my lifeblood. While the stories have almost always lacked something (something being cohesive, sensical plots), it was because we were being blown away by the imagery and the sound. It isn't all in the [fantastic] music either, from the sound of the…

What is Berberian Sound Studio about? Listen carefully.

If you do, you'll hear the music of Broadcast, the Birmingham-based electronic group who provided the score to Peter Strickland's second film. Broadcast, along with Pram, Stereolab, Position Normal and Boards of Canada, were one of the first British bands to work in what's termed the "hauntological" style.

The term "hauntology" was coined by the French theorist Jacques Derrida, who claimed that a society that considered itself beyond ideology - as the post-Communist West initially did - would be unable to imagine a future, and would instead be ruined by ghosts of the past. To understand what it means in terms of music, remember that the Boards of Canada were named after…

"This is not a horror film, this is a Santini film." - Santini,

Someone had to do sound design on a scene where people are doing sound design... I'm so fucking deep!

A sound tech is hired to help the Berberian Sound Studio create the sound effects for a horror film by an elusive director named Santini. The man becomes entranced by the process and slowly devolves into madness... or does he? It's a slow paced, atmospheric thriller and that creates a great theatrical experience.

This is a Giallo inspired film with great cinematography, score and lighting. The sound design is unsurprisingly one of the best parts of Berberian Sound Studio. It's one of the rare times where I thought…

Another in the great tradition of films about filmmaking, this is the rare entry about something other than a screenwriter, director, or actor: in this case, a meek British sound engineer, hired away to a scruffy, disreputable Italian studio to provide quality sound design for a grotesque-sounding giallo full of garish misogynist tortures. The film's genius is in never showing the film that the engineer (played by Toby Jones) is working on—the camera just focuses on his wincing responses, as he stabs cabbages or sizzles water in a pan to make the proper squelching or burning sounds. His descent into the hell of creative participation in something he doesn't believe in strongly recalls the madness of Barton Fink, but the…

After falling in love with Dario Argento last October, I've been gradually exploring what I can find of Italian cinema, in particular the mystery/thriller genre "giallo". As my enjoyment and appreciation grew, I decided it was finally time to check out Peter Strickland's modern examination of the genre.

A British sound engineer travels to Italy to work on a film, but due to a series of miscommunications he finds it less satisfying than he had hoped. As the monotony of the job and the overproximity to this disgusting material grate on him day after day, he slowly begins to lose his mind—and as he does, the narrative structure of the film likewise begins to disintegrate.

The film is a lot…

90/100

Peter Strickland is a rare talent whose ambitions are refreshingly original. His sophomore feature is a clever low budget fascinating tour de force with a daring tone.

Set almost exclusively in a sound studio, purportedly in Italy. Almost everything about this film is unique n intriguing, The screaming ladies who can't get the right scream, the smashing of the vegetables, the switching between languages, the unfriendly 'friendly' intimacies, and the undertones of there being something rotten (apart from the decaying vegetables) within Italian society, at the time.

The most admirable aspect of Berberian Sound Studio is that it uses the giallo style of film making to tell a story that is outside the original scope of the genre. The…