Berberian Sound Studios

The UK National Lottery and something called “The Low Budget Film Funding Project” are the corporate producers of "Berberian Sound Studio,” a 2013 film starring Toby Jones and directed by Peter Strickland. Conceived as a horror film and shot according to the conventions of the genre, “Berberian Sound Studio” is, in fact, a art-house picture, a morose and, ultimately, pretentious exercise in anomie. The situation is this: a milquetoast little Englishman travels to Italy to provide his expertise in sound-engineering on a torture-porn movie in post-production. The Englishman doesn’t speak the language and the Berberian Sound Studio where he works is dowdy in the extreme, a Kafkaesque labyrinth filled with antique analog (reel-to-reel) equipment. The film that the Englishman works dubbing is called “The Equestrian Vortex” and from the evidence of the title sequence that we are shown and the dialogue (mostly imprecations and shrieks) that we hear, the movie seems to be a cross between “Mark of the Devil” and Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” -- something about horribly tortured witches returning from the dead to wreak vengeance on their inquisitors or their progeny. The first half of the film is by far the best: the mousy little Englishman is nonplussed by the gory and erotically charged imagery that he has to dub. At first, he does his best simulating the sounds of bodies being hurled onto pavement, knifings, people boiled in oil, and a red-hot poker thrust up someone’s vagina. But, after a while, the poor bloke loses his mind and enters into the film that he is dubbing -- except in a post-modern and recursive plot development, the movie that he finds himself trapped inside is, in fact, the movie that we are watching, not the horror film, but the movie about the movie being dubbed. There are some effective moments -- the awful torture sequences in the film are cleverly simulated by imagery of watermelons being hacked apart and cabbage heads repeatedly knifed and the floor of the studio becomes a ghastly stew of rotting fruit and vegetables (close-up images of the putrefying sound props stand in for the pictures on screen that we only imagine.) The director of the film is a nasty Casanova and he mistreats one of the women hired to dub the film. LIke the witches in the picture in post-production, the woman wreaks vengeance on the studio, ripping the tape soundtrack to pieces. By this point, the film has advanced into David Lynch territory -- the hapless Englishmen seems to be sleeping in gloomy chambers that are an anteroom to the studio and the line between what is real and imagined becomes hopelessly confused. A new actress in the studio mouths words from letters that the hero, Gilderoy, has received from his mother and there is the obligatory shot in a film of this kind of celluloid caught in the projector and burning up. The second half of the film is clever, and frightening in parts, but doesn’t go anywhere. The plot can’t advance and, when new actresses are hired by the pussy-hound director and, then, seduced everything seems to simply repeat albeit with the frisson that we are now watching a film of the first-half of the film that we have just seen. Toby Jones’ performance is muted and annoying, one minor chord after another cued to a perpetual scowl of worry and loneliness. The Italians are broad caricatures and, after an hour, we feel like the main character, trapped in a sub-par version of David Lynch-land, prisoners of a weak parody of “Mulholland Drive” and, perhaps, Francis Coppola’s melancholy “The Conversation.”