Berberian Sound Studio

It ought to be a crime to waste Toby Jones. Dude is underrated as an actor. He brings a level of professionalism and gravitas to every role, whether it needs it or not. And he brought way more than he needed to for this pointless, meandering disappointment. His character, Gildero, is a buttoned-up, proper stiff upper lip Englishman, who works as a sound engineer for movies. While he is presented as highly sought after, it’s also presented that all he’s done is serious, high brow material, or peaceful, pastoral stuff. For some reason the movie never explains, he’s hired to go to Italy and work on a Giallo movie. If you know nothing of Giallo, the nutshell version is a mystery movie combined with a slasher, usually involving high sexual content, and a visual palate that looks like a box of crayons run through a kaleidoscope. Dreamy, lush, sexual, and visceral; the exact opposite of what Gilderoy works on. He is not used to the Italian customs, the ways of life, or the abusive nature of the crew towards each other. What Berberian Sound Studio wants to do is tell the story of how working on this movie bleeds into Gilderoy’s real life, as the horrors of the movie and his work situation warp his perception of everyday life. That would be a fine movie, a new twist on the influence of art on the artist. The sound of horror is just as integral as the visuals, and one can easily imagine somebody who is not a fan feeling out of their depth and even emotionally scarred from the experience of having to simulate the sounds of knives piercing flesh and hair being torn out by the clump. What the movie instead does is spend 70 of its 90 minutes showing a quiet guy get abused at his new job. There is no deep analysis of his psychological make-up. There is no exploration of how the horror film is eating away at Gilderoy. There’s just a quiet guy who keeps showing up to a crappy job. Only in the last twenty minutes does it even start to resemble anything else. Unfortunately, at that point, it’s squandered any good will it might’ve had. Worse yet, the last 20 minutes are a David Lynchian surrealist carousel, where nothing is explained, and no payoff is granted to anything you’ve seen prior. None of this last sequence feels earned or appropriate. Tacking on an incomprehensible ending to a painfully dull movie doesn’t fits tonally, nor does it redeem the movie. I am woefully disappointed in how this turned out. I was expecting a mind-bending psychological horror that used the making of movies as a backdrop to a mental breakdown and the psychology of sound on the mind, and instead, I got security footage of a quintessentially British guy quietly hating his life and dollar store surrealism.