Berberian Sound Studio
Runs Fri., July 5–Thurs., July 11 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated. 92 minutes.
We don’t learn exactly how a fussy English bachelor gets a job as a soundman on an Italian horror movie in ’70s Rome. That’s his profession, and the evidence suggests he knows his craft. But this gig is wrong on so many levels. The longer Berberian Sound Studio goes on, the less it matters how this ill-advised assignment came about. Because this experience unfolds more as a dream than a credible story. And the dream is a nightmare.
That’s the way it goes for Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a mild chap whose warm, loving letters from home are written not by a wife, but—as we discover when he reaches the bottom of the page—by his mother. Of course. Utterly at sea among the floridly warm-blooded Italians in this post-production studio, he’s just as uncomfortable with the content of the film he’s dubbing. It’s a giallo, as the Italians call their style of horror, and the sadistic material onscreen is discomfiting. Though, being British, Gilderoy remains as detached as possible while actresses record their terrifying screams for his microphones.
We don’t see that movie, by the way. It’s one of the fiendishly smart touches in this fiendishly smart film that we experience this trashy flick primarily through our ears. What better way to empathize with our protagonist, whose sense of hearing is precise. This description merely provides the setting for Berberian. Actually watching the movie is quite a different thing. It doesn’t take long to notice that how we get from one scene to the next can sometimes require a great leap of imagination, and that “reality” is going to get very changeable the longer Gilderoy stays on his job.
The pompous director of the giallo insists that his sadistic production is art, not horror. In this, writer/director Peter Strickland gives us a hint (or a warning?) about his own goals; the bucket-of-blood crowd will find Berberian disappointing, but that’s not what it’s about. Strickland emulates some of the slips in logic that fuel gialli, which tend to be the opposite of the tidy, well-plotted horror tales of the English tradition. By the time we get to the final act, things are trippy indeed. Like Gilderoy, the viewer is out of place, an uncomfortable visitor to a location that doesn’t operate in expected ways; the movie’s got some of the choked, obsessive quality of Repulsion-era Roman Polanski.
Strickland’s finishing touch is casting gnomelike Jones, who might be even better suited for this meek fellow than he was for Truman Capote in Infamous. All tweed and worried brow, Gilderoy can’t hold his sanity long in this world. And he won’t.
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