I dug this out of my archives. Certainly not my favourite film of that year (2012) but one I found fascinating, as a fan of Argento and the "giallo" Italian horror-thriller tradition.
With Berberian Sound Studio, writer/director Peter Strickland has devised an ingenious film that acts as both critique and homage to Italian 1970s horror cinema, as well as a first-rate psychological chiller in its own right.
Toby Jones gives a terrific performance as Gilderoy, a mild-mannered British sound engineer employed by an Italian horror film company in the 1970s. Because he is used to working with genteel documentaries and children’s programmes, Gilderoy struggles to come to terms with the subject matter of the film he is working on, and begins to question his sanity as illusion and reality start to blend together.
By staging the film entirely within the confines of the sound studio and Gilderoy’s hotel room, and by using mainly close and mid shots, Strickland generates a tremendous sense of claustrophobia and unease. As gruesome murders and torture are described and heard (but crucially never seen), foley artists create sound effects by stabbing water melons, cabbages and marrows. The close up images of these mangled vegetables are oddly disturbing simply because of the noises that have been heard at the time of their mutilation. The studio setting becomes increasingly dark and nightmarish throughout, and the narrative is oddly fragmented as frames of black and the big red “Silenzio” notice flash up at regular intervals. One remarkable shot shows a female voiceover artist screaming into a microphone whilst the camera pulls away, revealing her surrounded by a great black void.
The palette of the film is a deliberate homage to the giallo (literally yellow) 1970s Italian horror films, referencing directors like Dario Argento (who made genre classics such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Suspiria). At the same time, Berberian Sound Studio is a strong condemnation of the inherent misogyny of such films – elements that are admittedly less apparent in Argento’s back catalogue but very present in inferior works such as those by Lucio Fulci (who directed some truly reprehensible work, including The New York Ripper). Early in the film, the director berates Gilderoy for calling his film horror; self-righteously claiming that he has to show women suspected of witchcraft being horribly tortured because that really happened. Later a female voiceover artist (who is also a victim of the director’s womanising), challenges the director by saying the Inquisition didn’t just look for marks of the devil around the breasts! Furthermore, there is a clever parallel between the treatment of the women in the film and the treatment of women involved in the production, culminating in a sequence where one of the actresses recording voiceover is “tortured” by having loud feedback pumped into her earphones to elicit more convincing screams.
On a spiritual level the film plays (with tongue slightly in cheek) on the idea of how images affect people, and how a person can potentially become corrupted and changed by what they see – especially if they are having to watch and indeed interact with horrible images out of context day after day after day. In that respect the psychological deterioration of Gilderoy is reminiscent of James Woods’ character in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome – but without that film’s horrifying imagery. There are also echoes of David Lynch in the surreal final act, which will doubtless infuriate audiences wanting something more linear.