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…

Everything is disgustingly well-put together from a production standpoint and Toby Jones gives a truly perfect performance. But it's not a film you watch just to look at the craft, it's fully engaging and trying to provide its own experience all the way up until Gilderoy starts speaking Italian rather than English. After that point I can't speak much to how well it works, I feel a similar way to watching Mullholland Drive for the first time and just being completely lost. These last 20 minutes of Berberian both feel like a natural buildup from what came before as well as completely out of the blue. Thematically I am struggling, plotwise I'm struggling. There are definite things that come to…

For me, some of the most fascinating and compelling films show someone good at their job doing it well. This is one of the great pleasures of Berberian Sound Studio, watching Toby Jones' fastidious Gilderoy slowly create the sound mix and foley work for a (presumably) scrungy, sleazy Italian giallo film. Apart from a hilarious pastiche of a credits sequence, Strickland chooses to never show any of the Italian film - instead we hear snatches of dialogue and scene descriptions, along with a hundred different vegetable noises. As Gilderoy's initial disgust gives way to innate fascination, he is drawn in to the world of the film he is helping to create; one of the most devastating scenes is when his…

It’s Italy in the mid 1970s and the peak of the Italian horror, or “Giallo,” film movement. British sound designer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) has been hired by an Italian film company to create the sounds for director Giancarlo Santini’s latest gory horror opus, “The Equestrian Vortex.” But as he works on the film, he finds his input pushed to the margins, not being financially compensated, and his mind drowned out in an orchestra of chopped vegetables and women screaming.

It’s a testament to the genius of Peter Strickland that he finds constant cinematic invention in a film with such a limited setting. Not a frame of the horror film is shown, but instead we hear all of it within the…