Racking up the tension

Berberian Sound Studio is a film about a man who can’t get his expenses repaid and hurts a lot of vegetables — don’t worry, the RSPCV is on to it — although I suspect there may be rather more to it than this. I suspect there are hidden meanings. I suspect there are references to those nasty Italian giallo films of the Sixties and Seventies. I suspect it is, at least in part, a love letter to old, analogue sound technology. This is, in short, one of those arthouse tarts, always winking and hitching its skirt to those in the know. Yes, annoying for those not in the know — stop winking! Stop hitching your skirt! Have you no pride? — but I wouldn’t write it off all the same. It’s brilliantly creepy, whatever.

This is written and directed by Peter Strickland, whose first film, Katalin Vaga, a spare, unsentimental drama about the ramifications of a rape, won universal acclaim and quite a few prizes. Berberian Sound Studio is set in 1976 and stars Toby Jones as Gilderoy, a timid, priggish English sound engineer who usually lives with his mother somewhere idyllic near the North Downs (judging by the letters he receives from her). However, he is currently in Italy working at the Berberian Sound Studio on a film called Equestrian Vortex, an exploitation horror movie. Everything that happens does so within the studio, an atmospherically cramped, windowless, stifling place where Gilderoy must confront the language barrier, the menacing horror maestro, Santini (Antonio Mancino), a bullying producer (Cosimo Fusco) and a wonderfully hostile secretary (Tonia Sotiropoulou), who leads him up Kafka-esque culs-de-sac every time he requests the monies he spent on his flight be reimbursed.

We do not see anything of Equestrian Vortex itself — thank God, given how squeamish I am — beyond the opening credits (bloodied skulls) but can guess at its nature though the conveyor belt of jobbing actresses brought in to scream blue murder into the microphones and by snippets of the narrative spoken aloud every now and then: ‘A dangerously aroused goblin wanders the tunnel;’ ‘The two women creep along the subterranean poultry tunnel only to find the putrid corpses of the witches.