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Rupert
Brooke famously wrote that there is “some
corner of a foreign field that is for ever England”. It's a
sentiment that seems particularly fitting for Toby Jones in Peter
Strickland's not-quite-horror Berberian Sound Studio. Jones is
Gilderoy, a man whose tweed suits and maladroit demeanour are the
walking, breathing embodiment of Dorking. He's a sound engineer for
pastoral nature documentaries who has been brought to the dimly lit
studios of an Italian horror studio to provide the sounds for a
giallo: the kind of glossy, gory pulp chillers perfected by Dario
Argento in the 1970s. Tasked with aurally recreating the sadistic,
sexually explicit violence of a trashy horror and surrounded by
bullish producer Francesco and sleazy studio head Santini, Gilderoy
attempts to immerse himself in his work, unable or unwilling to
realise that his ordered world is falling apart.
Strickland's
film is never quite a horror film. We are never shown the horrific
footage that Gilderoy is providing the soundtrack for. Instead the
film seems more interested in the sounds of horror; or perhaps more
accurately, the horrors of sound. The hermetically sealed world of
the sound studio, where no scream or stabbing sound effect can be
escaped, drips with a very palpable malevolence, like a dial and wire
filled room of The Shining's Overlook Hotel. Much has been made of
the film's similarities to the work of Lynch or Bergman, and while
it's true that it shares Mulholland Dr's sense of unspeakable dread
and Persona's shifting identities, what is most impressive is that
Berberian Sound Studio seems always to be its own beast. Strickland
has learnt his lessons from these film makers without ever relying on
their formulas. Some have complained about the lack of a definitive
third act, but for the movie to increase gears in its final third
would be to drag it too far into territory derivative of film makers
like Lynch. Berberian Sound Studios takes it's time. It is patient,
it waits, and it ends when it wants to end. Anything else would be
cheapening.
Without
anything to hold the movie down, it would be easy for it to get
carried away with its own cleverness. Fortunately Toby Jones provides
just such an anchor. Jones is surely one of the best character actors
working, and here he gives what may be the performance of his career.
Like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, Gilderoy tries to escape into
a world of sound as he descends further into paranoia. Never could a
fish be more out of water, and Strickland even rings several moments
of brilliantly icy black humour out of his predicament. His pudgy,
crumpled face moves through an entire spectrum of emotions with the
movement of an eyeball or a twitch of a muscle. Strickland gives us
many reasons to admire Berberian Sound Studio, but Jones gives us a
reason to care. Together they have created one of the most
distinctive, bold and memorable films of the year.
