Betsy Cass breaks down the giallo references and the madness of Peter Strickland’s second feature, Berberian Sound Studio.
There’s something crucial that must be said before we can discuss this movie: it is not a horror film. I don’t care if some critic told you it was, or if Peter Strickland himself said so. It isn’t. Which is fine! But endlessly referring to it as one does a disservice to the film itself and the viewer’s experience of it. It’d be easy to argue that the raison d’être of Berberian Sound Studio is to prove you can make a horror movie with the absence of everything we expect from one. What actually got made, intentionally or not, is a film that uses all the elements of horror to make a movie that simply isn’t.
The logline for the film is simple: a reserved British sound editor is hired to do post-production work in Italy on a giallo and experiences some “emotional distress” in the process. From the first few seconds, things are off kilter. Sound effects like footsteps and typing are noticeably too loud. Screams from the titular sound studio form the backdrop to mundane interactions with a secretary. This is presumably meant to serve as an entrée into our protagonist’s mind. Without context, it could be seen as sinister or unsettling, but with foreknowledge of the universe Strickland has created for his work, starting with this second film, it plays more for queasy laughter. This juxtaposition between the weird and the banal would become a Strickland comedic signature, but he first employs it as a tonesetter here. Tone will prove to be one of the most important elements of the film because Strickland is either unwilling or unable to give us much else.
Toby Jones stars as the central sound man with next to no backstory and just as little revealed about him in the present. We get hints of something unpleasant in his past, but Chekhov’s gun never goes off, as it were. Very obtuse hints are all we get. Even though the film wants us to believe he experiences a full-blown meltdown, it’s hard to invest in someone we know so little about. What’s meant to trigger his loosening grip on sanity is in reality little more than mild cultural clashes, a displeasure towards the film within a film’s subject matter (he repeatedly notes he was expecting it to be about horses since it was called The Equine Vortex), and an admittedly creepy nightmare. Okay, it goes a little further than that, but it hardly feels like a complete psychological collapse. He’s not not cracking up, but there’s also no denouement to his madness. Things get pretty wacky. The end. The first time I watched it, I was certain I must have missed something vital that reveals the mysteries of the story or ties the threads together. I…had not.
The film is more focused on how it gets “there” than there being a “there” at all. And the “how” is all about the trappings of giallo. Strickland wasn’t the first to revisit the extreme sensory experiences of the genre (I think that honor goes to Héléne Cattet and Bruno Forzani with Amer), but the specificity of the elements he picks out and amps up are all his own. While others focus more on the visual language of key players like Argento and Bava (as in Anna Biller’s The Love Witch and Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor), Strickland uses those references sparingly and pointedly: vibrant reds, flashing lights, optical zooms that emphasize constriction, closeups of the black leather begloved hand of an audio engineer à la an unknown serial killer. They’re not just needless stylistic nods, but instead serve the mood being created by the carefully crafted soundscapes. Indeed, avoidance of certain giallo visuals defines the film. There’s no blood, no violence, no technicolor blues and greens. What we get instead is battered brown and a cramped workspace. It’s an oppressive environment, made even more so by the inescapability of what’s on the screen for the characters (but offscreen for us) and the shrieking, squelching sound effects being recorded to accompany it.
Strickland (unsurprisingly) focuses on the aural aspects of Italian films of the era. Sound is a major component of his subsequent films, but never as front and center as it is here. He takes a four-pronged approach, the first of which is the aforementioned foley work. The second is the lurching, Mellotron-heavy, Goblin-inspired score. It appears mostly as diegetic sound in the mix for the film within a film, but there are moments where it’s unclear if it’s bleeding outside of those confines. It’s heavy and maniacal and its usage in quotidian moments, like the constant screams, is disorienting.
He employs his third angle of attack the same way. Essentially all Italian films in the ’70s were dubbed, even if the end result involved the original actors speaking their native language. And, like the shoots themselves, it was often done quickly and cheaply. It creates a foreignness and a distance that has become an iconic part of their atmosphere. Even when the lips and the words should match, the dub is rarely precise. The quality of the sound, too, is alienating, as when a far-flung shot that should include the encroachment of natural background noise features dialogue that is too clean and close. Countless scenes feature actors isolated in a compact sound booth recording overegged dubs to fantastical scenes we never see. Instead, we get exceedingly dry descriptions of extreme violence from the audio recordist (there’s that ol’ Strickland comedic incongruity again) setting up the scenes on deck, leading into feral, guttural vocal performances by the actors. They are truly caged animals in their booths. But in other scenes, Strickland flips things completely, dubbing his own actors. The dreamlike disorientation it creates is perhaps the most effective element in sowing doubt about reality and sanity throughout the whole film.
The final audio element provides the contrast to all the Italian homage. Silence here is a vital part of the meticulous sound design, especially sudden silence. A flashing red sign demands “silenzio” before recording sessions start, but the audio screeching to a halt at the end of a take is far more unsettling. The single act of violence in the film, a bad dream suffered by the protagonist, occurs in no-audio-recorded silence. It’s another instance of Strickland flipping techniques he’s been using throughout. Everyday moments are soundtracked by screams, but a sudden crash of horror plays out in total auditory deprivation. This is the rare moment that doesn’t play its unease for laughs and one more way our understanding of the film’s reality is undermined.
Much of what does and does not happen is subject to debate, as is whether or not it was set in motion far before the events of the film even begin. In many ways, it does not matter. There’s no real characterization or plot or climax to hold on to. You could call it a tone poem, a formal experiment, or a chamber piece, but even a character study would be a stretch, as the protagonist is as minimally present as any I have ever seen in a film. In the end, there is no satisfying payoff. There’s not even a satisfyingly ambiguous payoff. Or perhaps a payoff at all. There’s a gauzy ellipticity that implies that the whole thing could start over again in an instant, or that what we’ve seen is just one take in a series of them, ready to be followed by another alternate.
And the horror? While what does transpire is all dressed up in its ’70s Italian best, it ends up being unexpectedly low-key. The film takes its time getting to the mental unraveling of its protagonist, and when it does finally get there it’s slightly anemic and possibly unearned. Strickland is far from the first to sidestep the tropes of a genre as an exercise or an inversion, but the film is so obsessed with the absence at its core that it becomes hollow itself. It’s a work of fitful hilarity and glossy craft covering something slightly hollow underneath. There is an odd charm at work here, and an admirability for trying something quite different, but the experimentation fails to congeal into something more. If you go in hoping for a traditional climactic horror bow on the film’s proceedings, you won’t find it here. But if you’re content to bask in the singular weirdness of Strickland’s world of workplace foibles cranked up to terrorizing levels and revulsion played for laughs, then you’ll get far more mileage out of the idiosyncrasies at play.
Notes:
– Broadcast did the score for the film and it’s received quite a lot of acclaim in its own right. Sadly, frontwoman Trish Keenan died of pneumonia before it was finished. I used to listen to it a lot when I was writing even though it’s full of screams and possession gibberish.
– The movie doesn’t have any opening credits, but in their place it does have a smash cut to opening credits for the film within a film. And they go on for a loooooong time, which is incredibly delightful.
– While many Strickland signatures make their debuts in this film, his brunette doppelgängers actually stretch back to his debut feature, Katalin Varga. Here it adds to the dreaminess and confusion. As for what it means as a more overarching element of his oeuvre, your guess is as good as mine.
– Didn’t have time to address the food in the film earlier, but it’s definitely another important recurring theme for his work. His latest, Flux Gourmet, is about sound AND food. Here, the myriad fruits and vegetables used for the foley effects serve a dual purpose. In their purest form, their tactility is an ode to all things analog, which the film is deeply concerned with. Once they are discarded and are left to decay, they mirror the protagonist’s degrading mental health.
– It’s tough to describe Strickland’s humor, but the best I can come up with is that it feels sort of Soviet. It almost feels too low stakes to call Kafkaesque, but the combination of mundanity, cruelty, and fatalism are definitely not normal in “Western” productions. There’s an air about it of demons complaining about the lunch selection in hell.
– A non-small part of me thinks this whole movie is just a pun about “being of sound mind.”
– Apparently, a stage version of this was produced at the Donmar Warehouse a few years ago. I would have killed to have seen that!
— Betsy Cass
10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective 