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Reverb (2008)

Director: Eitan Arrusi

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From Time Out London

This seriously duff British indie rock shocker sees starry-eyed muso moppets Leo Gregory and Eva Birthistle accidentally invoke the murderous spirit of a Charles Manson-like ’60s session musician while cutting their latest potential chart topper. Padded out with ample techno-lechery over top-of-the-range recording equipment and slick studio space (the film was funded by EMI music publishing), writer-director Eitan Arrusi labours to generate scares with choppy editing and doomy blocks of feedback on the soundtrack. But his po-faced and unoriginal treatment of saggy material does little to pique the interest.

Even genre stock-in-trades such as grungy make-up effects and supernatural mythology are fudged in favour of jump-cutting around the recording complex and shoe-horning in redundant references (perhaps in an attempt to justify its perplexing structure?) to René Clair and Luis Buñuel. It just about works as an exercise in empty style, but that doesn’t compensate for the small matter of its near-total incomprehensibility.

Author: David Jenkins 2009-03-03 11:41:28

Time Out London Issue 2011, 5 – 11 March, 2009