Film

Berberian Sound Studio (2011)

Director: Peter Strickland

Synopsis

Britain has a mad inventor in its midst, and his name is Peter Strickland. Although, on the evidence of his slow-burning debut, ‘Katalin Varga’, you wouldn’t know it, as the entire film was shot in Romania and with an entirely Romanian cast. His new film is a very different beast. Where that first film embraced the rustic settings and long takes of someone like Bela Tarr, this new film appears to be a homage to Dario Argento plus the cycle of paranoid thrillers coming out of America in the seventies (notably De Palma’s ‘Blow Up’ and Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’). ‘Berberbian Sound Studio’ stars the always reliable Toby Jones as a mild-mannered foley artist who’s asked if he would supply sounds for a violent Italian horror movie. But once he arrives on set, nothing is as it seems. From chatting to Strickland during shooting, it’s a film that revolves around a very intricate sound design, and if he can pull it off, this looks set to be a very interesting proposition indeed.