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…

A red sign flashes in the darkness of a sound studio - Silenzio, it says, evoking the ghost of Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. A tribute, perhaps, warning us that this story too will explore the murky intersections of dream and reality. It does so quite effectively through a range of discrete elements, but it never goes beyond the unsettling effect of its own individual units.

The logic of Lynch's masterpiece is precarious at its best, but the viewer is still offered enough to arrange the material into a relatively coherent whole, conceding that the picture might evolve over time as the eye becomes attuned to something that had previously gone unnoticed. Berberian Sound Studio, on the other hand, eschews…