Review by Tristan Bishop
“This is not a horror film.”
This line from Berberian Sound Studio leapt out at me on viewing, firstly because one of the themes of this year for me is the question of what actually makes a horror film, and secondly because of the nature of the film itself. The line is being spoken by a character in relation to the film-with-a-film (more on which later), but it comes across a key line – Berberian Sound Studio wants you to question what it is doing, what it is portraying and how you feel about it. Make no mistake, this is not horror-by-numbers; we are dealing with something far more interesting here.
The plot of the film is a very simple one – in fact, in many ways, it is almost not a plot at all, but a scenario. It is the 1970s, and Gilderoy (played by Toby Jones) is an English sound engineer who has travelled to Italy to work on a film called The Equestrian Vortex for the producer Giancarlo Santini. The job at first seems to be fairly straightforward – recording dialogue (as all Italian films were shot without sound during this period), screams and sound effects – most of which are achieved by mistreating a never-ending stream of vegetables. However, the culture clash between the reserved Englishman and the flamboyant, sometimes aloof, sometimes intimidating Italians, mixed up with the disturbing nature of the film they are working on, serve to unsettle Gilderoy and possibly to fragment his psyche altogether.
I say ‘possibly’ because, as I have hinted above, this is not a film which spoon-feeds you. In fact, it jettisons traditional plot structure entirely. Second-time director Peter Strickland has stated in interview that the film is structured like a tape-loop (similar to the analogue technology used in the film to achieve effects which warp sounds into new shapes). Things repeat, but are changed as events occur. Time seems elastic and non-linear – an effect heightened by the wonderful editing, which occasionally makes it seem like Gilderoy’s apartment is actually an extension of the studio (we never see anything outside the apartment or the studio).
Of course such daring and uncommercial tactics could well sink the film in a mire of pretention from which it would be hard to crawl out of, were it not for the fact that every single element is crafted to perfection: the aforementioned editing, the direction, photography, music, sound (of course) and acting. Toby Jones is a revelation, and makes you identify with Gilderoy’s sensitive and impressionable character, and he works as the moral centre of the film without having to signpost this using dialogue.
In fact about half the dialogue in Berberian Sound Studio belongs to the film they are recording – but we never see any images from the film itself, other than an incredibly accurate and thrilling (especially to us fans of Italian horror) credits sequence, featuring spot-on music from retro-futurist Warp Records recording artists Broadcast (now sadly missed after the recent passing of one of their members). Many reviews have claimed that Gilderoy is affected by the violent images he is seeing, but I think the film is working at a deeper level here – it is a film about complicity, about how we can be forced into doing things we are not comfortable with, and how morals, and therefore our entire persona, can be malleable. I don’t want to spoiler anything here (quite difficult with a film of such unusual structure) but one sequence towards the end of the film makes this explicit.
Is Berberian Sound Studio a horror film, however? I don’t think there is a definitive answer to this. The director has stated that he doesn’t like to refer to it as a horror film, but, unlike the quote at the top of the page from the in-film director Santini, this is not from some conceited idea of his own importance, but rather due to some negative feedback that early screenings of the film received from horror audiences. I find this a real shame, as the horror scene can always do with directors of Strickland’s obvious abundance of talent, and more films which stretch the boundaries of the genre. Berberian certainly uses the tricks and techniques of the horror film, but the content is what seems to be the sticking point for some. Whichever way you look at it, however, Berberian is beautiful, intelligent, disturbing, impossible to ignore and certainly among the greatest British films (horror or not) of recent years.
Berberian Sound Studio is out now on Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray, from Artificial Eye.