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Berberian sound studio netflix9/5/2023 ![]() ![]() In fact, it takes more inspiration from the world of electronic and synth creations and the heyday of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and it is close in spirit to Kafka’s The Castle or to the Gothic literary tradition of Bram Stoker and Ann Radcliffe: a world of English innocents abroad in a sensual, mysterious landscape. At the mixing desk, he is part high priest, part human sacrifice in the black mass of cinema production.īerberian Sound Studio has something of early Lynch and Polanski, and the nasty, secretive studio is a little like the tortured Mark Lewis’s screening room in Powell’s Peeping Tom, but that gives no real idea of how boldly individual this film is. Slowly, he becomes immersed in the pure sensual horror of sound: the screams, the scrapes, the clunks and clicks, the sudden electro stabs, the dusty silences that bring out his inner fears. But how on earth has he got this job? Gilderoy is certainly a whiz at creating new effects, but that might not be the only reason he was hired. (Sadly, however, despite the title, no one gets the coconut halves out.) Gilderoy is confronted with the film’s dyspeptic producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco) and the elegant and sinister director Santini (Antonio Mancino), and Gilderoy baffles and irritates everyone with his maladroit Englishness and nerdy insistence on being reimbursed for his expenses, an issue which is ultimately to raise unexpected questions. In the studio itself, bored guys aurally simulate human atrocity by whacking and stabbing vegetables, while female stars give operatic screams in the sound booth. Lonely, homesick Gilderoy finds himself working on an explicit horror called The Equestrian Vortex. With its nasty corridors and distant, repeated and meaningless screams, the building is like a psychiatric hospital. ![]() This cheesy, crummy place provides the electronic music, sound effects and dialogue overdubbing on low-budget pulp shockers – the giallo genre made famous by Dario Argento: sex, violence and Satanism. These facilities are presumably in Rome, but there is to be no high-minded cinephile swooning over the history of Cinecittà and the like. Toby Jones plays a mousy sound engineer called Gilderoy from Dorking in the 1970s he has taken a job in a post-production studio in Italy, the Berberian sound studio of the title. ![]() It is seriously weird and seriously good. Arresting as it was, nothing in that movie could have given us any clue to this quite extraordinary followup: utterly distinctive and all but unclassifiable, a musique concrète nightmare, a psycho-metaphysical implosion of anxiety, with strange-tasting traces of black comedy and movie-buff riffs. The elderly sound engineer shuffles about the place like a zombie.Three years ago, British film-maker Peter Strickland grabbed us with his debut, Katalin Varga, an eerie revenge drama unfolding in the central European countryside. The title of the movie is The Equestrian Vortex and it's based on a true story. Is there a fresh melon?' Toby Jones is a lofty British sound recordist in Italy to add the squelchy sound effects to what has all the earmarks of a cheap giallo, whose pompous director (Mancino) feels captures the truth of a witch-goblin-torture-virgin college students-slasher: 'This is not a horror film – this is a Santini film!' As Jones becomes increasingly concerned he won't be paid for the work, he gets sucked into the witchy story on screen, getting increasingly bedraggled as he begins to lose his mind.Īlthough we never get to see the movie itself, through the snatches of dialogue and the reading of the scene synopsis to give the voiceover actor's motivation, the humour leaks through: 'Scene thirteen: the dangerously aroused goblin tries to molest Teresa' At the end of his tether and sick of Jones' wormy disquiet over money, watching blustery producer Francesco (Fusko) slowly get worked up from calm business man to a jittery mess is fun. A must for horror fans and there isn't a monster, a killer, or a gruesome death in sight? Or even blood? What gives? This 70s-set comedy horror is for those who enjoyed The Conversation and Italian gore-fests. ![]()
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