Here’s an inventive setting for a psychological thriller – the sound studio where the cheesy Italian horror movies of the 1970s were dubbed and mixed. Everyone comes to work, put on headphones and screams into a mic. Naturally, there’s plenty of droll humor, like when the two sound techs (named Massimo and Massimo) mimic the sound of stabbing human bodies by plunging butcher knives into watermelons.
A British sound engineer (Toby Jones) down on his luck, arrives for a gig and is horrified to discover that he’s working on a gory exploitation movie. His English reserve is no match for either his loud and volatile Italian coworkers or the impenetrable Italian business bureaucracy. Slowly (and this film is not quick-paced), he begins to crack.
This is not the kind of horror film with lots of on-screen gore. We only see the opening credits and one brief glimpse at the movie that is being dubbed. We hear the spinechilling screams and the scary sound effects while we are watching bored techies with headphones. The suspense is in the watching the Jones character teeter on the brink of unraveling.
Berberian Sound Studio is getting some rapturous critical praise that just seems like hyperventilating to me. It contains some clever parts, but there’s just not enough thrill there for a thriller. Toby Jones’ spiral into madness in the last 25 minutes is very good, but by that time I was struggling to stay awake.
Berberian Sound Studio is enjoying a brief theatrical release and is avaiable streaming from Amazon and other VOD purveyors.