You watch the trailers for a film like Fast & Furious 6 and you possibly think to yourself, “That looks cool.” But how many times have you watched a trailer and walked away talking about how it sounded. Well that’s bound to happen every time someone watches the above trailer for the psychological thriller Berberian Sound Studio, courtesy of IiTunes Movie Trailers.
Don’t let the arcane sounding title dissuade your immediate interest. This is the kind of film that doesn’t pop up in America all that often. Well, it was directed by English director Peter Strickland – his second feature after 2009’s Katalin Varga. But I mean this isn’t the kind of film that gets made in English very often. Slow-burn throwback thrillers keen to rattle the ears as much as the eyes are a rarity anywhere, really.
Toby Jones, who will be busy with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Captain America: The Winter Soldier for the next year or so, will play a Brit named Gilderoy who takes a job working with an eccentric director on an Italian giallo film in the 1970s. Gilderoy is a celebrated foley artist – the tireless workers who create far more sounds for movies and TV than you might imagine – and the particularly gruesome subject matter works its way inside his head and causes him to confront his own past.
It seems like the kind of film that would be out of this world when heard through expensive headphones, with a mild sedative involved. Roman Polanski’s name is used in a blurb, and while the foley artist character makes this film minimally comparable to Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, Berberian Sound Studio really looks and feels like it’ll fall more towards the Italian roots of the giallo film featured within it. Even Brad Anderson’s Session 9 comes to mind, with its skin-crawling use of sound. Suddenly I want to eat fruit in the most extreme way possible.
