While working on the sound design for an Italian horror film, Englishman Gilderoy (Toby Jones) begins to gradually...ya know...lose it.
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While cinema is meant to be a primarily visual medium, nothing can ruin a film faster than bad sound. Suddenly you begin to notice how sparsely populated the street scenes and party scenes are. A three minute scene can feel like an eternity. Good sound on the other hand, can bring a film to life by creating a whole separate world outside the one we are witnessing on screen. This is the world of Berberian Sound Studio.
Though we never see a single frame of the Giallo film that Gilderoy is working on (outside of the wonderful title sequence) we feel the horror right from the get-go. My wife has even banned me from playing the soundtrack when she's around. Just a few notes of Broadcasts's wonderful, Goblin inspired score is enough to send chills up your spine. Add to this the startlingly violent sound-effects along with the vivid, spoken descriptions of the horrors being depicted in The Equestrian Vortex, and your mind will wander to some pretty gruesome places.
But don't go assuming that this film is nothing more than audio porn. The visuals are no slouch either. All the visual cues you would expect from a Euro-horror film (shadows, red lights, brutal smash-cuts, stomach-turning inserts, black-gloved hands, slow-tracking hallway shots, etc.) are there in abundance. When used in conjunction with the soundtrack, what you get is an authentically horrific and uniquely cinematic depiction of a man gradually losing his mind/soul by embracing the misogyny inherent in much of the horror genre. How much horror and brutality can you watch without becoming horrific and brutal? Where is the line?
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