F I L M G H O U L

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012)

If Brian DePalma’s Blow Out (1981) and David Lynch’s Mullholand Dr. (2001) had a child, it would look something like Strickland’s masterful Berberian Sound Studio, a dense, hypnotizing dive into the making of a giallo film from a sound recorder’s increasingly unhinged perspective. The medium itself becomes the maddening weapon (it is no coincidence that the projectionist, unseen and faceless, wears leathers gloves throughout - a staple of the giallo killer’s outfit) and like with Lynch, colors, textured rooms and bursts of refracted light soon become a prison for our main protagonist’s mind. Berberian Sound Studio leaves you with many queries and an immediate, haunting, desire to delve right back in, to indulge in the film’s uniquely gripping atmosphere of cryptic deconstruction all over again.