Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

Berberian Sound Studio: Directed by Peter Strickland. With Toby Jones, Cosimo Fusco, Antonio Mancino, Fatma Mohamed. A sound engineer’s work for an Italian horror studio becomes a terrifying case of life imitating art.

“u0026#39;Berberian Sound Studiou0026#39; is a film about an English sound technician (Toby Jones) who is used to creating sound effects for childrenu0026#39;s TV shows, who travels to Italy to work on a horror film. We follow him as he grows more and more homesick and as he gradually becomes hopeless. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThere isnu0026#39;t much in the way of acting in this film but Toby Jones is a very talented actor and does perform well here. The other actors certainly are not poor, they give decent performances but none of them are particularly memorable. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe script is so basic and undeveloped you can practically see the writer shrug and say u0026#39;thatu0026#39;ll do,u0026#39; by the end. The first half hour is interesting because you get to see how sound effects are made and the whole dubbing process in general. After 30 minutes this gets tiresome however and I know it is supposed to be cyclical and seem never ending for Toby Jones, but it is so obscure you donu0026#39;t really care. When a film gets to the point where it thinks itu0026#39;s smarter than everyone else it becomes a pretentious mess, leaving you thinking they could have written that same concept with a more understandable and entertaining script. It deliberately tries to confuse you by adding pointless scenes here and there but in the end you realise the film only lasted an hour and a half but seems to last three hours. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eOverall, this was quite disappointing. I really wanted to like this film; I had read so many great reviews on it and was looking forward to seeing it. Unfortunately it made me question the judgement of so many film critics that I follow.”