Berberian Sound Studio

Berberian Sound Studio, set entirely in an Italian dubbing theater sometime in the 1970s, stars Toby Jones as a milquetoast English foley artist who travels to Italy to work on the soundmix of a Dario Argento-style horror movie. But the plot of this dream/nightmare film is of little consequence. Writer/director Peter Strickland (Katalin Varga) is far more focused on creating a creepy period atmosphere than telling a story. Because of this, the film has extremely limited appeal.  I’d say it is a film made only for those who love Italian cinema of the seventies and bemoan the lost art of analog audio engineering, except that I’m one of that crowd and I didn’t much care for the film. Like the Coen Brothers’ wonderfully stylish but frustratingly hollow Barton Fink, this picture has all the trappings of an ingenious comic nightmare set in a Kafakesque world where filmmaking is hell (or purgatory), but lacks sufficient narrative to ground an audience and enable us to identify with the protagonist.  I could not stop asking myself “why doesn’t Toby Jones’ character just leave?”  Successful dream/nightmare films (such as Terry Gilliam's Brazil) never leave room for this question--we understand inherently that the world the main character inhabits is not a world that can be easily escaped. In Berberian Sound Studio, we see Jones readings letters from home, reminding us that he does have a life away from this place, and that he was invited to do this job, not forced. Others may have a different take--this kind of movie often becomes a cult picture for a select group--but I was left unmoved and bored.