The film is beautifully shot but, unsurprisingly, it's the sound mix that deserves all the plaudits. This is a film that can't be watched on a laptop, or a plasma TV. One of my favourite films from last year - a real cinematic experience in the truest sense. Both films are unsettling in their simplicity and pace themselves, preferring a journey into madness rather than the madman himself. The movie I would most closely compare with Berberian Sound Studio is We Need to Talk About Kevin. We will see a stray house spider or hear a mechanical hum and this film will amplifying these features, any features, until it's otherworldly. The cinematography and sound mixing are the real winners here, and they are beautifully unsettling. A visceral experience which takes place in no more than three interior locations. Hell? Berberian Sound Studio is an experience. There are characters, relationships, and agendas, but everything is slowly shaken up until you can't tell what's real, what's the film-within-a-film, and what has all become something else. This movie will not present to you a conventional story, and I think that is why a lot of people might not enjoy it as much as I did. They are both self-reflective and they both take a step back from the artform, twists it, and then steps back in. I was currently reading the book "House of Leaves" which is a similar type of experiment for the observer. I have to say I was primed to watch this movie. the same viewing experience portrayed in the movie itself. The ONLY way to watch this movie is in a theatre. I saw Berberian Sound Studio at the Wisconsin Film Festival and it completely enveloped me. One thing that surprised me is that this movie is relatively unknown, even though it received quite a few awards and Peter Strickland's first feature length movie ( Katalin Varga) was pretty successful. Oh, the soundtrack by Broadcast is also great and the film owes quite a bit of its atmosphere to their music. There are bits and pieces in this film that evoke David Lynch ( Inland Empire), Dario Argento (any of his movies, really), and Roman Polanski ( Rosmary's Baby), but all in all Berberian Sound System is pretty unique and quite unlike any other film. A professional accustomed to working on serene documentaries about nature, hired to work on a horror flick which he can't stand watching. Furthermore, we never find out why was he chosen to work on the movie. Apparently the flight he took from London never existed, he's being forced to torture other people, and he goes through constant retakes of portions of The Equestrian Vortex, a film he detests. Some hints seem to point to Gilderoy being in some sort of personal hell. Or is it the other way around, is The Equestrian Vortex bleeding into reality? It's hard to tell. It appears that Gilderoy himself becomes a part of The Equestrian Vortex as he starts being overdubbed in Italian and is consumed by the burning film tape. The movie is pretty much open to interpretation especially when considering many scenes towards the end of the film that depict hallucinations and the blending of realities. We get the sense that there is no escape for Gilderoy, mistreated and pushed around as he becomes aware of the gravity of the situation he found himself in. This is further amplified by the visual style of the movie which contains dreamlike frames and scenes. There's a constant sense of danger and inevitable failure for Gilderoy even in the most ordinary of situations such as reimbursing his plane ticket. One less obvious and much more visceral source of horror is the sound studio itself along with its inhabitants such as the perverse and menacing director Santini. Even when the sounds are shown to be fake (stabbing cabbages, blending tomatoes), they don't lose any of their impact and creepiness. We never see any gore or violence, but we're instead immersed in it through the soundscapes of the movie. The horror most obviously comes from the film inside the film, The Equestrian Vortex (not really about riding horses), which is being edited by the main protagonist, the sound editor/foley artist Gilderoy (great acting by Toby Jones). I find this film first and foremost to be an existentialist and psychological drama inside which other genres such as thriller and horror are played out. I loved every second of Berberian Sound System. This is a film I've watched only recently expecting it to be a modern take or homage to the Italian horror films of the seventies when in reality it turned out to be so much more.
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