A most unusual movie, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is. It's a horror movie without actually being a horror movie, and until you see it, you won't really know what that means. Rest assured, aficianados of Italian horror flicks and movies-about-movies will have a lot of strange fun with BERBERIAN, which stars the always-great Toby Jones as a conflicted sound man working on a disgusting giallo for a pompous director.
EW has just premiered the domestic one-sheet, and it's quite fantastic, calling to mind the abstract one-sheet designs of the 60s and 70s.
Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened in this studio. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a shy and nondescript sound engineer from the UK is hired to mix the latest giallo film by horror maestro, Santini (Antonio Mancino) and he soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actors, capricious foley artists and confounding bureaucracy. The longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in Dorking. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gossip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s film that Gilderoy is responsible for orchestrating. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem.
Toby Jones, Cosimo Fusco, Antonio Mancino, Fatma Mohamed, Tonia Sotiropolou, and Salvatore Li Causi all star in the film, which opens theatrically, and via VOD, on June 14th.
Tonia Sotiropolou