Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

directed by Peter Strickland

UK

92 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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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.