Berberian Sound Studio

Peter Strickland, UK 2012. 92mins. Certificate 15

A sound engineer’s work for an Italian horror studio becomes a terrifying case of life imitating art.

The second feature by British film-maker Peter Strickland (Katalin Varga) is a psychological thriller set in a 1970s Italian horror film studio. Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) stars as Gilderoy, a foley artist working on the audio track for an Italian giallo film, The Equestrian Vortex. While we as an audience see nothing of this film, its low-grade brutality begins slowly to bleed into Gilderoy’s psyche.

One of Sight & Sound‘s top ten films of 2012, Berberian Sound Studio is dark, funny and hypnotic, with the best use of sound since Coppola’s The Conversation.

★★★★★ “With a face suggesting cherubic innocence, vulnerability and cruelty, Toby Jones gives the performance of his career, and Peter Strickland has emerged as a key British film-maker of his generation.” GUARDIAN

★★★★ “A stylistically ambitious, morally radical, thematically complex work… Strickland’s vision deserves the highest praise.” TIME OUT

★★★★ “A dark sibling to The Artist, Peter Strickland’s psychodrama wants to recalibrate how we listen to the movies” TELEGRAPH

“If you’re open to films that fearlessly twist the conventions, and that mine the language of sound and image for their own strange potential, you’ll get a kick from this rivetingly inventive, abrasively un-British piece of nightmare cinema.” INDEPENDENT