The Tangle (2019)

directed by Christopher Soren Kelly

USA

99 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

I've been really excited for this because I'm such a big fan of Christopher Soren Kelly and I'll watch anything he's in or that he directs. I'm saying all of this upfront because I'm very biased- this review isn't in any way objective, it's coming from somebody who was already pretty certain they would love this even if it technically was bad. That's how it is.

Probably the first and most apparent thing about this movie that most people will notice is that everybody talks REALLY weird. It's hard to describe, kind of a mixture of cyberpunk tech speak and a faux-1920s neo-noir hardboiled detective-type cadence without the transatlantic accent. The term "grok" is thrown around. All delivered perfectly deadpan. When people deliver their lines in this, you can really feel the script behind it, it's more like they're reading poetry or excerpts from a book than talking like real people talk. I don't think the actors were responsible for this; the whole thing was just written in such a very specific way that even if you had the best actors in the world doing this stuff it would still come out the same. Even Christopher Soren Kelly's character has that feeling and he's the one who wrote it all. You either like this or you don't, and if you don't, it will get on your nerves very quickly, because this is one of the talkiest films I've seen in recent memory and hardly a second goes by where someone is not jabbering. I personally was really into the bizarre speech patterns and anachronisms, but your mileage may vary.

Where this also might get some people is that it kind of mixes up the narrative progression, so certain things don't happen in a linear fashion. We're shown events, contextless, in the middle of the movie, and they might have happened days or weeks before the movie started or they might have happened just prior to it, and we don't really get any opportunity to piece this together for ourselves until a character explicitly figures it out. This, I can't say I enjoyed as much as the dialogue. It's a little confusing if you're actively trying to determine what goes where on a linear frame. So you have to just kind of go with it- you can have a loose idea of where the storyline is from where the characters are in the room, and any scenes where they're in different positions probably means the scene is from sometime in the past. But even that isn't always reliable. The Tangle really plays it fast and loose with time, to... interesting effect.

Also, for such a complex plot involving the interweaving of every human soul on Earth (literally, souls are an integral part of technology) in a web evolved from the present internet (which also still exists, but is viewed as somewhat outdated) called the Tangle, most of this takes place in one room. This is where Christopher Soren Kelly's talent as a screenwriter and director really comes through: he establishes this whole world through nothing but nonstop talking. None of the external scenes have that much to do with the worldbuilding, as they could have been cut from pretty much any generic sci-fi movie. What really makes this is how the characters talk amongst themselves about the concepts the film centers on. "Amongst themselves" is a key phrase in recognizing why this film is so good at development: there had to be a happy medium between explaining important details about the world to the viewers while also establishing that this world was something the characters were used to living in. If somebody gives unnecessary background about things that they're supposed to already be familiar with- like, if I explained how Apple was founded every time I talked about calling somebody on my iPhone- it takes you out of the flow of things. So the fact that the dialogue in this movie was able to develop a world without making us feel like the world was still in development is impressive.

Again, the biggest con with this is that it's fairly impenetrable if you care about actually trying to figure out what's going on while it's going on. If you can sit back without engaging and stop trying to follow threads that are just confusing and will ultimately not lead you anywhere, because you don't have all the information yet, this won't frustrate you. And you'll be able to see how good this movie really is. It's very, very dialogue-driven, and its toolset is sparse, but I think it does a lot with what it has and I found it very original and enjoyable.

Last Sunrise (2019)

directed by Wen Ren

China

103 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

----

I was a little disappointed by this because it seems like I didn't get as much out of it as other people did, according to the reviews. I think I was expecting something a little more thoughtful and artsy, but this is a full-on, big-budget science fiction drama without much to it below the surface level- no metaphor, no unconventional character backstories, basically just what you'd expect. That's not a bad thing, and this was an enjoyable movie, but... there's nothing to it, really, and I had hoped for more.

I had trouble getting past the premise, or at least the way it was presented. It takes place in a future where we've gone fully solar, ditching fossil fuel for good after it runs out and converting everything to solar power resulting in a cleaner, cheaper, and much more reliable source of electricity for the whole world. Until the sun just disappears one day, plunging the planet into freezing darkness. I'm not usually one to complain about a story being unbelievable- I watch a lot of sci-fi, and sometimes I think I'm more interested in it for the "fi" part than the "sci" part. But ironically it's the fact that they do explain where the sun went that made me unable to vibe with that part of the plot. It's ridiculous and silly, and then a bunch of other ridiculous and silly space stuff happens like the planets all go drifting around the solar system like pool balls and Earth careens off into the galaxy yet everything is... well, not fine, but livable if you can get heat. I think that the whole idea of the sun going out after we become reliant on solar energy may have been intended more as a cautionary tale of why you shouldn't lean entirely on any one source of energy, but taken literally it doesn't make for a believable plot.

I was impressed by how this looked as a vision of the future. There are a couple of scenes in the alleyway outside the main character's apartment that look like a more plausible depiction of an alternate-energy future than a whole lot of other films. The stalls hawking dirt-cheap solar technology, the convenience store whose conveniences are massively ahead of our current time, the little personal motor vehicles everywhere- it all looked natural but still visually interesting as well. Sucks for that random confused white guy who happened to be in the convenience store when everything went belly-up.

Ultimately I just felt like there should have been more to this. It has a lot of messages and ideas that I did like, but with the bigger picture it does virtually nothing. The main character and his ride-along encounter a couple of difficult situations over the course of a short period of time, but eventually make it to a somewhat hopeful end. That the scope of the movie was so small is a big part of why I felt let down: I was hoping for a longer-term view of the apocalypse, but this really seems like it all happens in the course of maybe a day or even less after the initial disappearance of the sun. There's no long-term suggestion of what life on Earth will look like as we fly aimlessly into the cosmos except a sort of vague notion of "it will be fine".

The heart at the center of this is why I liked it, though- that "it will be fine" mindset, even though sometimes I wanted to run up to people and go "none of this is fine! it is physically not possible to survive this way!" was kind of nice to see. I liked this future where we just keep rebuilding and we lend each other a hand along the way, and we have confidence that we'll continue to adapt and live. It seemed like no care was ever given to how long we might live- nobody conceptualized about the far future, they all just took it as a given that we would figure out ways to continue surviving and thriving together. This did feel really arrogant when I looked at it from certain angles, but it mostly just felt like a continuation of the film's lack of a scientific perspective. If you take it as more of an allegorical thing, where the sun catastrophe is just a stand-in for any event where civilization finds itself at an impasse, the end message of the film- survival through collaboration, innovation, and community support- is reassuring and hopeful.

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)

directed by Takao Okawara

Japan

103 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

I've never been as much of a fan of the 90s and 2000s Godzilla films as I am of the earlier ones, but this stands out as possibly the most emotionally devastating entry in the franchise, with the exception of the original film. We're introduced to a Godzilla who is mortal from the start, unstable and burning with the consequences of his own inexorable ties to nuclear energy. He comes out of the ocean like a ticking time bomb, not wreaking havoc with his own sheer size and power for once but being consumed from the inside by the forces that made him what he is. A lot of motifs here are taken directly from the original film, and the concept of the weapon that was first used to kill Godzilla at great cost to the security of humankind is explored further and given shape as Destoroyah.

The enemy that Godzilla faces in this looks like a goofy, generic kaiju, but what it represents is maybe the most powerful thing in all the Godzilla universe. Godzilla is a representation of the unchecked power and danger of nuclear weapons, but Destoroyah is that power. Destoroyah was born directly from the oxygen destroyer weapon used to kill Godzilla, a weapon that was treated with reverence and fear, and whose inventor gave his life to ensure it would never be used again. That's the real horror of this: that Serizawa's sacrifice in the first Godzilla movie could have been for nought, because no matter if the method of constructing the technology is destroyed, weapons of mass destruction will keep being invented over and over again in different forms as long as there's war to be made. This is what Destoroyah is. Godzilla always has the potential to be a force greater than his origins, but Destoroyah has one purpose, and that purpose is to kill.

Godzilla suffers like a human in this one. I think that's the most important thing about this film and why it is so powerful. He undergoes much of what he's been inflicting on humankind this whole time. Godzilla's son returns, but instead of the bumbling, ridiculous, absurdly ugly Minilla of the 1970s, he's grown up to be just a slightly smaller Godzilla who appears more gentle and apt to communicate with humans who have special ESP powers. However, before we can get acquainted with this new creature, he dies. In one of the most emotional scenes in the whole franchise, Godzilla finds the body of the child he adopted and raised and watches as he dies in front of him. And I just kept thinking: Godzilla knows now. I'm aware of the inherent ridiculousness of discussing the trauma of a fictional Japanese monster, but this was a thing that struck me deep. He knows now. He knows what it's like to lose family to war, to senseless violence. This movie made Godzilla human in a way that no other instance of the franchise has.

I think it's extremely poignant that instead of using the typical firestorm of bombs and explosive weapons against Godzilla, because of his state of nuclear meltdown, he must, in this scenario, be hit with cryogenic lasers until completely frozen. I couldn't help but think of this as a manifestation of a desperate need to stop time, to halt its progress in the hope that we might be able to return to a place that only exists now in our nostalgia. As possibly the most recognizable icon of Japanese culture there is, to freeze Godzilla and prevent him from evolving any further than the form he was in circa 1995 sends a message of wanting to become stable in an increasingly unstable world. But it's too late, Godzilla burns too hot to be contained by any amount of ice. Time and culture move inevitably forward, and take along with them the things that were once familiar to us.

That this would have been the final Godzilla film had Hollywood not resurrected the franchise makes Godzilla's potential death by freezing even more fitting. I love Godzilla, I didn't want to see him die, but die he would have, perpetually frozen just before self-destructing, had the real world not demanded his return. I don't think any other monster has the same depth of meaning as Godzilla while also retaining serious entertainment value- this is a super fun movie even if you don't think about its emotional intensity. In today's climate of insanely high-budgeted and entirely empty superhero action films, cues from Godzilla could impart lessons about how to create a complex film that's still a good time to watch.

The Block Island Sound (2020)

directed by Kevin McManus, Michael McManus

USA

103 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

I've been really excited for this for a long time, it's just been sitting on my watchlist as I waited for it to be released and I had no idea that it would randomly appear on Netflix one day. Good for me. This is a niche within a niche, but I love to read about mysterious sounds. I think a lot of ghost stories get bogged down in description of what the ghost physically looks like, and stories about paranormal sounds get down to the root of what I feel like a good ghost story should be: Something intangible that imparts a feeling of horror by altering the atmosphere around you rather than by being frightening visually.

This in mind, I had a bit of a twofold misconception about this movie. I thought it would be something like the Taos Hum, a phenomenon that was specific to a locale and could be experienced by anybody, and because of that I wasn't expecting such a personal storyline. The Block Island Sound is about one man and his family who all become affected by a bizarre sound that is eventually revealed to be just one entry in a record of unexplained phenomena caused by the sound as it roves around the world's oceans. This is good, because if there hadn't been the personal/familial element it would have just been a two-bit horror movie. The family stuff isn't the most original in the world, but it saves this from being an unmemorable story with no hook to it. And for what it's worth, it's directed by two brothers who also cast their sister in a major role, so there is a slight real-life familial element to it.

I think this is one of those horror movies that takes a while to really show its hand as a horror movie. It's got an exceptionally good sense of place, set against the backdrop of a coastal town where the presence of the ocean is heavy and all characters know their way around a boat. I'm not sure if the island is fictional or not but it's set somewhere in the general area of Up North (U.S.-wise, that is) and there is a reference to Providence, RI that I refuse to believe is coincidental. For a while it's largely a daylight horror; even though a lot of the scary events take place at night while a character is "sleepwalking", the investigation of what's behind these episodes takes place during the day, so an important element of what's intended to be creepy goes on in daytime. This gave it kind of a weird tone- although those bright-but-grey Northern days are very moody, there's not a lot of actual ambiance to be felt here. It's unsettlingly realistic that way, because it doesn't feel like the environment was altered to tilt it in a direction that would make for a better horror movie; it just feels like everything that happens is happening plausibly, to real people, in a place that could be the next town over.

There is a scene in this about midway (no spoilers) that set the tone for the rest of the film and made me realize that even though it switched between fleeting, conventionally scary nighttime scenes and unassuming daytime ones, The Block Island Sound is serious about being creepy. The main character, already having hallucinations of his deceased father, is out for an angsty midnight drive when he sees a deer in front of his car on the road. After we see the deer, the movie cuts back to the inside of the car, where the protagonist's dead father is now in the passenger seat and is making this noise, a noise entirely devoid of humanity, that eventually we realize is meant to be the word "deer". He just repeats this over and over, this animalistic sound, like something that's never used language in its life. Deer. Deer. Deer. Deer. That scene was so unexpected and so terrifying that, after not having been too bothered by anything thus far, I got seriously freaked out.

At the heart of this movie is something really, really upsetting in a philosophical sense. Something about creatures that have designs on humanity that are familiar to us because of practices that we already do here on Earth, but that we never consider the implications of were they to be done to us. That's very vague, but it's about as much as I can say without spoiling the ending. I can't say that this was the movie I thought it would be while I was still anticipating it, before it came out, but I'm more than satisfied with what I got instead. This is a lastingly creepy and very original film, and it actually nails making the titular sound be genuinely haunting. I think it's a whale, but who knows? It's distorted and processed beyond being recognizable to my ears, and that auditory uncanny valley effect is why it was so good and disturbing.

The Oxbow Cure (2013)

directed by Calvin Thomas & Yonah Lewis

Canada

79 minutes

3 stars out of 5

----

A movie about a woman moving to a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere to isolate away from other people is possibly the most apropos thing to watch in the current situation, but what I didn't expect from The Oxbow Cure prior to watching it was that it is specifically about disability. I don't frequently see films that talk about chronic pain, or if they do they're not as personal as this one. So having something like this where the disability is sort of danced around (ankylosing spondylitis) but definitely legible to those who actually have it is somewhat rare.

This is a body horror film in probably the most literal interpretation of the phrase. I did have a misconception that it would be a more traditional horror movie before I watched it, but it's far more of a look at one woman's contemplation of her own body, her imminent future in it, and what it means to be apart from other people. The horror comes from facing down the knowledge that your future will involve disfiguring pain and stigmatization, and trying to figure out how to mitigate your symptoms while also acknowledging that this thing will come for you eventually. Like an unstoppable It Follows demon of pain and suffering, the lead character's spondylitis manifests in different ways over the course of the film, an unwelcome intruder she can't get rid of.

I'm going to keep this review at least somewhat short, because there really isn't much substance here. I don't think the lead character even says ten words throughout this whole thing. It's really just about one woman isolated in a cabin by a frozen lake, and that doesn't leave much space for monologuing. We never learn much about her apart from her diagnosis and that she's recently had a parent die. One symptom of her disease is a lack of energy, so that's reflected in how she doesn't move around much from the cabin save for one sequence of wandering that is all the more unnerving because it's so out-of-character. The film is shot in an uncomfortably intimate way; at times I could pretty much visualize the cameraperson getting up from a crouch and shifting position because of the way the camera was moving. It feels voyeuristic sometimes, looking in on a woman grieving. She briefly has a dog, but it slips away. She watches videos of exercises that are supposed to help with her pain, and the calming voice and attractive body presenting this information on the tape is cast as alienating, unfamiliar. The whole atmosphere is disorienting and strange. Like I said, this is about a specific disability and sort of also about chronic pain as a whole, but it could easily be mapped onto our current experiences of covid isolation and paranoia.

There is a moment in this movie towards the end that changes the whole tone, and it's difficult to talk about without spoiling because it only works if you don't expect it. Many reviews have already talked about this, but I'm going to avoid addressing it directly. Suffice to say, though, I didn't see that coming. A fairly obvious interpretation would be that it represents the woman coming to terms with her disease, or possibly mourning her dead loved one, trying to hold close either something that repulses her or something that she feels slipping away, and I would tend to agree with that meaning, as I don't really see any others. All in all, I can't say I was thrilled by this movie, but it's something very unique that I did appreciate a lot. It's barely even a movie, it feels more like one long video essay or art piece. 

I'm still troubled by thoughts of where that dog ran off to.

Vivarium (2019)

directed by Lorcan Finnegan

Belgium, Denmark, Ireland

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

It took me a long time to watch this for reasons unknown. I think it was just too popular at the time and that intimidated me. There's a whole lot to unpack here, and I'm about to attempt to do that, but before anything else, I want to say: this movie is good. It's very good. I want to make sure I emphasize that it's an excellent movie aside from all of the metaphors and symbolism I believe it uses, and even if 100% of what it tries to convey goes over your head, I think anybody can still enjoy it just because of its overall quality.

The image of rows and rows of identical houses in a labyrinthine suburban neighborhood is not, by itself, necessarily indicative of any particular message, because it's used so frequently in media that it doesn't have to be attached to any societal commentary anymore. It can just be a motif used for aesthetics. It can come up in a child's drawings and in fact frequently does- the lines of houses made up of a block with a triangle for a roof, two windows, a little door; everybody knows how to draw that. But Vivarium does take a deeper look at this image of a perfectly spotless and identical suburbia, and it examines how insidious the idea of a "neighborhood" is at its heart. I think most things about this film were made to represent the unnatural cycle of life that capitalism tries to impress on young people- but not everything about it, which was crucial, and which I will get into later.

The film starts off with a young engaged couple wandering into a real estate company's office and eventually being shown around Yonder, a housing development made up of, as I just said, innumerable rows of the same house copied and pasted over and over to infinity. The sky is wrong; the clouds don't look real, and nothing about the scant bits of "nature" that exist in Yonder here and there is natural. In short, it's all obviously constructed as a prison of sorts. And it ends up being one- the couple immediately gets roped into staying in their assigned identical house, No. 9, and is almost as quickly presented with a human baby and the instruction "Raise the child and be released". 

(The child is probably the creepiest thing about this overall pretty creepy film. That boy just ain't right.)

One of a multitude of tiny details that makes everything about this movie's scenario that much more sinister is that the agent who shows the main characters the development emphasizes that it is good for a young couple. The very last thing Imogen Poots' character says before her and her fiancé get trapped in the neighborhood is that they don't have kids- not yet. These two facts, them being young people and not having had children yet, are why they're unacceptable to Yonder and, in a larger sense, to what society expects of us. It's not acceptable that by a certain time a couple should still be without a home and children, never mind personal desires or the economical instability that might lead them to that situation. "Not yet" is never a good enough explanation for not having children. A woman can't be allowed to have her own reasons for living her life at her own pace. The monitoring eyes of capitalism have to know if she can be used to reproduce more subjects.

Circling back around to the child they're given: The aspect of reproduction is what makes Vivarium such a nightmare to think about, insofar as any one singular thing can be described that way- the whole thing is just a horrible scenario to imagine yourself in. It's explicitly established that the only purpose of a mother is to produce identical, obedient subjects, who will then further ensnare other potential mothers into Yonder, who will then continue the cycle and produce more subjects in an endless loop. I am intentionally only mentioning the role of Poots' character as a mother because it seemed to me that her counterpart did not have too much of a part in any of this. I still wonder what Yonder really wanted with him- I guess he was kept around so that she would be slightly more complacent, but why allow him to dig the hole in the front yard and discover the whereabouts of their home's former inhabitants? But then that leads to the question of just... why do anything? Why any of this?

Things that seemed open-ended and made no sense were vital to the overall feel of the movie because, coming back to what I said at the beginning of this review about not every single thing being tied to a recognizable metaphor, it's better that a large portion of this is just totally absurd and random. It makes for a better viewing experience and more stuff to chew on. I know that I've used this as an example for how not to make a "dystopian" film before, but I think back yet again to that movie where straight people are ostracized and gay people are the norm. Simply flipping a stereotype on its head does not good science fiction make. Pointing a finger at a thinly veiled caricature of society doesn't do it for me either. A contextless child's drawing of rows of square-and-triangle houses means nothing without a narrative behind it. But something like Vivarium that is not straightforward, that has all of these bizarre and unsettling elements to it- like the fact that the boy seems to be in contact with some thing, some indescribable entity that may or may not be running the show- something like this is an interesting, unique dystopia. It merges recognizable commentary on society with the truly weird. Imogen Poots really does carry the film, even though kind of the whole point is that no space is given for her or her fiancé to be individuals. Her performance, especially at the end when the relentlessness of the neighborhood's assault on her leaves her just broken and helpless, is what makes this movie as good as it is. And again: it is very, very good. Director Lorcan Finnegan is establishing quite a track record.

Don't Tell A Soul (2021)

directed by Alex McAulay

USA

83 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

This movie may have other villains, but the backdrop of industrial decay, middle-American poverty, and the boredom of coming of age are the trifecta that pull the strings. A general feeling of hopelessness pervades it all: None of the characters are getting the life they should have, beset either by family issues or by problems they brought upon themselves. Don't Tell a Soul is a character study about how various people react to their feelings of helplessness and how other people take advantage of those feelings.

It's also one of those movies with a concept that sounds ridiculous but makes sense in context. Two boys running from a security guard after stealing money for their sick mother accidentally end up trapping the guard in a random hole in the woods after he trips and falls into it, and the film is about their responses to that and ideas of what to do with this guy now that they essentially have the power to decide whether he lives or dies (or at least is horribly uncomfortable for a long time). This is all played straight despite the inherent comedy of falling into a big hole, and I think maybe that's why I'm seeing some negative reviews. I am surprised that the general response to this film isn't more positive, because even though it was at times slow and maybe a little difficult to believe, I thought it was executed really well and took its time exploring issues that a lot of other movies would just breeze by. Again, this is pretty much wholly a character-driven movie- if you're expecting horror based off of the dark poster and the vaguely sinister title, you'll be disappointed.

I'm going to get into some spoilers from here on out, because as usual it's hard to discuss the complexities of this film without going into more depth than would allow for an unbiased viewing of it. There's not a whole lot to be spoiled in this, though, because even if you do find out its main twist it still doesn't change the fact that the movie is good. But be forewarned anyway.

So the whole idea of this is basically to look at how a vulnerable character can be manipulated, and also the various ways in which people respond to their own vulnerability, from Jack Dylan Grazer's character latching onto whoever is willing to be a father figure for him, even if that person is obviously dangerous, to his older brother's becoming a bully and a horrible person in an effort to eliminate all weakness from himself. The least-fleshed-out character is Rainn Wilson's fake security guard in a hole- ironic, because he's the one with the most facets to his backstory. Everyone else is who they say they are, but just to the degree that any random person off the street is who they say they are, which is to say that everyone has their stories. But the guy in the hole has genuine secrets where everyone else just has baggage. You can see Grazer's character be slowly drawn in by him, and he doesn't even have to lie about himself to ensnare the kid- the way he jerks the two impressionable boys around according to his own whims is scary, but somehow he does genuinely seem to care about them, in some weird twisted way. This is why it's so easy for the younger brother to get attached to him: If his older brother, the person who he's supposed to be closer to than anyone, hates him and is violent towards him, then that's the only kind of relationship he knows how to form, so the guard being a violent person is not a deal-breaker to him as long as he is also willing to show him some kindness where his brother refuses to.

It's really a look at how a good person can be broken down by the world around them, turning down a darker path without even realizing it. There is no explicitly visible social issue here, like drugs or racial violence; the cracks that an abusive relationship and a lack of support and resources make in a person are shown to be universal and affect anybody so long as they were unlucky enough to not be born into riches.

I really don't know how I felt about the very end as it was the only part of the film that seemed to fall into the trap of a more rose-tinted view of the world, which was pretty out of character given how the rest of it was so depressingly realistic. I'm not sure I go for the idea of redemption for somebody as determined to prove themselves a boorish, violent person as the older brother. I guess it's different with teenagers and that may be the point of the older brother's last-minute turnaround: You can either realize what path you're going down and correct it, or you can become someone like the guy stuck in the hole.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

directed by Peter Strickland

UK

92 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

---

It's been a very long time since I last watched this and I felt like I needed to look at it with fresh eyes. It remains one of my favorite films upon second viewing, but Peter Strickland is a director who frustrates me because I feel like there's something about his pictures that would reveal itself to me if I were smarter or more versed in the visual language he uses. I'm not sure if this is deliberate- Berberian Sound Studio does involve secrets being kept from the protagonist, so the opacity of it all could have been an intentional theme- or if I'm just overthinking things. I want to force meaning into films too often, to look at an image and be able to tell what it signifies, but there's not always something deeper. Sometimes the visual beauty of an image is its own meaning.

(Also, I feel like nobody ever talks about this, but the word "Berber" is a slur. It is good to keep that in mind even though this is an excellent movie.)

Where do I even start with this film? There are so many layers to it. Toby Jones' main character, Gilderoy, has so many facets that you start out thinking everything is being hidden from him and end up wondering what of him was being hidden from you all along. At the beginning he is cast as the ultimate mild-mannered Englishman, severely out of his depth when hired to do sound design for an extremely violent giallo film. It's established that his previous work has been on films showcasing the beauty of various English locales- small, tame, monotonous travel films promoting the natural wealth of the countryside. This should be taken into account when considering how strongly he is influenced by the work he does on the giallo. The work he's used to doing is going out and recording a collage of sounds that will best bring nature to life and make the viewer feel like they're experiencing each little bird chirp and whistle of wind in whatever backwater is being showcased, and he goes from that to using this talent to bring to life the sounds of torture, violent murder, fear, and evil. With how used this character is to immersing himself in the atmosphere of whatever locale he's tasked to depict, it's easy to imagine that delving that deep into a murder would prove troubling to him.

There's a feeling to this movie and an idea behind it that I just find relentlessly fascinating. There's the image on the screen, what we see as viewers of the movie called Berberian Sound Studio, and then there is the image in the director Santini's head, the fictional giallo titled The Equestrian Vortex. This second image we never see except when it is conveyed through the recording of dialogue and sound effects for it. In this way, the fictional movie exists in our own heads- when we hear a knife stabbing cabbage while a modulated woman's voice howls in pain, we may see through it like a Wizard of Oz man-behind-the-curtain moment; we may see Toby Jones stabbing the cabbage and someone in the sound booth behind him pushing buttons and turning dials to produce the screams. But the sounds set off our own imagining of what is happening in The Equestrian Vortex, creating a movie that only exists in each individual person who watches Berberian Sound Studio. This labyrinth of fiction and creation is disorienting and unlike anything I've seen before or since.

It's really difficult to quantify what ends up happening to Gilderoy at the end- I can't tell if the version of him at the end of the film is who he'd been all along, with his previous veneer of politeness being just a weird dream, or if it was a backsliding into some darker past from before the events of the film. I don't know what about him is true and untrue, which version of him was the fake. The letters he receives from his mother feel incredibly ominous despite being innocent on the surface because you feel like there's so much going on there that just isn't right. Nothing adds up about his character, but nothing adds up about any of them, really. Everyone in this is cold and distant and out to do whatever they want to do. The women of the film end up trapped in this, the only people who are taken advantage of rather than doing the taking.

This is just a weird, hypnotic, uncomfortable descent into madness either forced upon one by one's circumstances or latent in one all the time. It's kind of hyperreal, everything looks plausible on the surface but at the same time people make strange decisions and act in ways that would get any reasonable person ostracized for being massively rude. I think the thing about it that I love the most is still Broadcast's soundtrack, which will always feel thoroughly eerie to me because it was created after the death of their vocalist, Trish Keenan, and was the last thing sole remaining member James Cargill did under the Broadcast moniker. Keenan's present in her absences here, and the knowledge of her real-life death gives the film a highly haunted aura. But there's no doubt that having her voice on the soundtrack would have improved it tenfold beyond any feeling of haunting that her loss lends it.