Week 7 – Berberian Sound Studio

Netflix is an absolute boon to my bank account. if it wasn’t for that beautiful, red database, I would still be spending hundreds of pounds every year on weird films, on the basis that their trailers were okay – not okay enough for me to go see them at the cinema, but enough for me to own them for the rest of eternity. With the addition of Netflix, I can now just find all of these obscure movies that I once umm-ed and ahh-ed over in HMV, and not get weirded out by the sweaty people in terry-towelling standing by the ‘70s sitcom boxsets.

Out of the five films I went through this week, I guess you could consider three of those films to be dramas. There was a theme recently to shoot films with a sharper lens, a darker filter, sparser dialogue. This is fine if the subject matter calls for it – Closed Circuit was a fairly decent political thriller and suited the muted tones and clinical script that Steve Knight and John Crowley applied. Less can be said for Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. Not being content in creating a straight-forward horror or an existential thriller, or even a spoof, Strickland thought he’d roll all three into one and do so in under 100 minutes.




Clearly taking a fair bit of inspiration from Dario Argento and those films that weren’t quite exploitation films but got so close that you felt quite seedy in watching them, Strickland spends a whole lot of time introducing tone and suspending scenes in the ether for dramatic effect. But the result is that of boredom. Good ol’ Netflix categorises Berberian Sound Studio as a horror, but it isn’t. If anything, it is reminiscent of those iconic teen flicks that spent its whole budget on creating aesthetic choices and forgot to pay attention to anything else – films like Spring Breakers, Gummo and Blue Crush where everything looks gorgeous but nothing actually happens. And not in the good Harold Pinter way. No, this kind of time-wasting is palpable – you sit and you watch and you can feel your eyes distancing themselves from your brain, like they’re ashamed.

Toby Jones is, in my opinion, a deeply underused and underrated actor and so it annoyed me that he played the overworked, unrecompensed sound engineer that this film revolves around. This movie proved that you could be the star of the film and yet still be craved by the audience. There was no substance to Berberian Sound Studio. Not only did you not care about these characters, but there is no scenario on Earth that could allow you to, the story is so flimsy. A week after watching it and I am still wondering how it came to fruition. Maybe I’m just getting older – this might be an example of the personal growth I sometimes feel when I buy quinoa instead of Super Noodles – but I did not have the urge to watch this film again. Life is too short to try and understand films. Berberian Sound Studio is not a good film, and I don’t need to watch it again to prove that. Thank you, Netflix.


Films of the Week: Closed Circuit, Conversations with Other Women, Berberian Sound Studio, Spiceworld, The First Wives Club