Only three years after his impressive debut Katalin Varga, Peter Strickland’s new film is now released nationwide, truly a spectacle to behold. Gilderoy is a sound engineer hired to work on a new Italian horror film going into post-production. He is a reserved man; for the Italians he is working with, he simply confirms their stereotypical opinion of the British. Among a crowd of massive egos, he is subdued, worrying only about when he will get a refund for his flight to Italy.
We learn comparatively little about Gilderoy’s background, and even then, the very nature of the plot and the turns it takes require us to question what we assume we know. He receives seemingly innocent and caring letters from his mother, who we assume he lives with. This film, by far, is the biggest project Gilderoy has ever worked on; at home, his studio is simply a shed at the back of the garden. Everything about this character is meticulously thought through, and miraculously realised through an ideally cast Toby Jones. His isolation, from the very beginning, is emphasised. He is the quiet genius slowly losing his mind, far from home, disturbed by what he is seeing, by the very nature of his work, by the atmosphere created around him, by the suffocating trap he feels he is falling into. At least, we think this is the situation.
Whereas Katalin Varga was all about the outdoors, made menacing and oppressive in Strickland’s vision, here we are forever trapped inside, in a chilling and bare network of corridors, in the studio itself, or the little room next to it assigned to Gilderoy as living quarters. These three interiors make up (almost) the entire world of the film, and as we appear to chart Gilderoy’s mental decline, they become ever more threatening, ever more closed off from the real world, the world we can only guess lies outside. There is a brilliant moment when Gilderoy deliberately rustles some leaves and twigs underneath his feet in the sound studio in pitch darkness. When an actress comes up to him and asks him why he is doing this, he says simply, “It reminds me of home”.
The interiors themselves are at once stiflingly tangible and menacingly surreal. They are a conglomeration of the constant whirrings of magnetic tape, of a red flashing ‘Silenzio’ sign, of beige tints synonymous with the 70s time setting, and claustrophobic glass booths facing a cinema screen, where headphones are placed over your ears and a microphone in front of your face, completing the double removal from reality. All of these are nightmarish traps, not unlike those found in the kind of giallo horror film that Gilderoy is helping to make. Even the tape is set to work by a disembodied hand, inserted inside a black glove, like the murderers in a Dario Argento film.
And then the film itself, The Equestrian Vortex, must be considered. We only see the opening credits, a frightening, gaudy, violent montage of bright reds and blacks, an authentic recreation for the kind of film it is meant to be. After that, we see nothing. We hear only synopses of scenes, snippets of dialogue recorded by the actresses in the booths, the violent sound effects produced by Gilderoy. This is a masterstroke of storytelling. Just as he arrives in Italy, Gilderoy is sat down to watch a violent scene with a demonstration of the kind of sound effects his superiors wish him to produce. Two water melons lie on a table. At the correct moment, they are chopped loudly into pieces, making Gilderoy wince, presumably at the explicitness of the violence on screen combined with the exaggerated sounds accompanying it. He is uncomfortable from the word from the very beginning. In a moment of dark humour (one of many), he is offered a piece of the watermelon.
We will hear some of the later violence explained in the scene synopses. It is trash, disturbing and misogynistic. Gilderoy tries to tell ‘Santini’ (the movie’s director) that he has never worked on a horror film before, at which he is rebuked. Not only is this not a horror film, but a ‘Santini’ film (as Gilderoy is told), but the events in the film ‘actually happened’. It is a film ‘in pursuit of truth’. Gilderoy is too timid to express his true feelings.
The people around him are disgusting chauvinists. The ‘truth’ they claim to explore in their film is little more than their own fetishistic fascination with the degradation of women, something that makes giallo horror very difficult to stomach, and led to allegations of misogyny being placed against its most famous representative, Argento. Powerless, in need of money, and unable to speak out, Gilderoy continues with his work, producing the sound effects for the movie, always with the aid of food. As the job drags on, the food begins to rot. We see Gilderoy becoming slightly more frustrated and dishevelled day by day. There is anger inside him, impotent but accumulating. He sees horrible things and is forced to participate in the manipulation of the actresses used for the dubbing. Things begin to take strange turns.
It is at this point that an audience makes connections with Bergman and Lynch. Coppola’s The Conversation must have been a strong influence on this film, but for anyone who has seen that masterpiece, the parallels are obvious, and perhaps not as fascinating as those with the work of the first two directors. Certainly, the Lynchian elements come to the fore strongly with the film’s delirious, knockout final third (of which I will say nothing, except that one must devise their own interpretation and be prepared to re-think everything they have previously seen), and no film aficionado could fail to recognise the iconic image of a film suddenly burning up, as though the tape was combusting in the camera, only for it to re-start later. Indeed, the links with Bergman’s Persona do not simply stop at a stylistic nod, but perhaps are continued more strongly in theme, with the ideas of identity, self, isolation. Persona, in some ways, was a film about film itself, able to be interpreted as a kind of essay.
It seems strange that so few directors have seen the potential for a movie about sound engineering in the film industry. Just for recognising it, Peter Strickland must be given respect. Where he goes with the idea is even more spectacular. Berberian Sound Studio has been billed as a horror movie, and indeed, in many ways it is. But to pigeon-hole this film would be a crime; it is a strikingly original, genre-defying piece of cinema, a breath of fresh air and an incredible spectacle that warrants close analysis. It is the kind of film that people will write essays on years from now, offering different interpretations and points of view (that is, if it gets the attention it deserves and doesn’t fall into obscurity). If anyone was in doubt after such an impressive debut, Berberian Sound Studio has at once taken its place among some of the most original movies of recent times and confirmed Peter Strickland as a visionary modern filmmaker. It is one of the best films of the year.
15 certificate
Review by LiveWire Young Film Critic, James Martin (September ’12)