Berberian Sound Studio

2012

92 mins

Directed by Peter Strickland
85%
53%
Drama
Horror
Thriller

Mind-bending psychological thriller set in the 1970s about British sound technician Gilderoy (Toby Jones) who travels to Italy to work... More

Mind-bending psychological thriller set in the 1970s about British sound technician Gilderoy (Toby Jones) who travels to Italy to work on a gruesome horror film. As he goes about assembling the movie's terrifying soundscapes he finds his state of mind wobbling and his psyche under threat from the nightmarish task. Winner of Best Director, Best Actor and Best Achievement In Production at the 2012 British Independent Film Awards.

"Films that attempt to replicate the lurid style of Italian giallo films from the ‘60s and ‘70s often mimic the obvious details - colored gel lighting, psychedelic soundscapes and black gloved killers - without going any deeper. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio takes an entirely different approach. This is a bizarre atmospheric thriller that digs deep beneath the skin to probe giallo’s bloody beating heart. The titular sound studio provides Strickland with both a means of paying homage to the esoteric details of giallo - particularly the genre’s unique approach to sound design - and a context for Gilderoy’s collapse into madness. Toby Jones delivers an exceptional performance as a naif who is thrust into bizarre world where cinematic horror and reality are inexplicably fused." (Fantastic Fest 2012)

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Berberian Sound Studio | Ratings & Reviews

85_%95 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes® rating
53_%3,310 reviews
Audience score rating

"A delicately detailed immersion into the world of Z-grade Italian horror cinema that ultimately may or may not be a horror film itself ... a tense, teasing triumph."

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Variety

"Crammed with detailed craft, its appeal is further widened by dealing in universal fears: homesickness, identity, mental health."

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Total Film

"In this era of cookie-cutter cinema, Strickland's deeply personal moral and stylistic vision deserves the highest praise."

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Time Out

"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. It is seriously weird and seriously good"

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The Guardian

"A love letter to the weird territories of foley and film sound and also to giallo, the grand-guignol horror genre carved into the flesh of Italian cinema by Argento, Fulci, Crispino, Avati et al in the 1970s."

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Sight & Sound

"Psychedelic aesthetics, psychogenic fugues - it is the disorientating giallo Lynch might have made."

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Little White Lies

"Anchored by a typically flawless performance by Jones, Strickland's second film begins as an audio geek's dream, before spiralling inexorably into the stuff of David Lynch's nightmares."

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Empire Magazine

"With each cut and splice, <b>Berberian Sound Studio</b> becomes quietly insinuating and unsettling: as with <b>The Artist</b>, as with all artists, its worst fears lie in screaming and not being heard."

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