Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

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.