Berberian Sound Studio Trailer Is A Psychologically Thrilling Assault On The Ears

You watch the trailers for a film like Fast & Furious 6 and you possibly think to yourself, “That looks cool.” But how many times have you watched a trailer and walked away talking about how it sounded. Well that’s bound to happen every time someone watches the above trailer for the psychological thriller Berberian Sound Studio, courtesy of IiTunes Movie Trailers.

Don’t let the arcane sounding title dissuade your immediate interest. This is the kind of film that doesn’t pop up in America all that often. Well, it was directed by English director Peter Strickland – his second feature after 2009’s Katalin Varga. But I mean this isn’t the kind of film that gets made in English very often. Slow-burn throwback thrillers keen to rattle the ears as much as the eyes are a rarity anywhere, really.

Toby Jones, who will be busy with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Captain America: The Winter Soldier for the next year or so, will play a Brit named Gilderoy who takes a job working with an eccentric director on an Italian giallo film in the 1970s. Gilderoy is a celebrated foley artist – the tireless workers who create far more sounds for movies and TV than you might imagine – and the particularly gruesome subject matter works its way inside his head and causes him to confront his own past.

It seems like the kind of film that would be out of this world when heard through expensive headphones, with a mild sedative involved. Roman Polanski’s name is used in a blurb, and while the foley artist character makes this film minimally comparable to Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, Berberian Sound Studio really looks and feels like it’ll fall more towards the Italian roots of the giallo film featured within it. Even Brad Anderson’s Session 9 comes to mind, with its skin-crawling use of sound. Suddenly I want to eat fruit in the most extreme way possible.

Nick Venable
Assistant Managing Editor

Nick is a Cajun Country native and an Assistant Managing Editor with a focus on TV and features. His humble origin story with CinemaBlend began all the way back in the pre-streaming era, circa 2009, as a freelancing DVD reviewer and TV recapper.  Nick leapfrogged over to the small screen to cover more and more television news and interviews, eventually taking over the section for the current era and covering topics like Yellowstone, The Walking Dead and horror. Born in Louisiana and currently living in Texas — Who Dat Nation over America’s Team all day, all night — Nick spent several years in the hospitality industry, and also worked as a 911 operator. If you ever happened to hear his music or read his comics/short stories, you have his sympathy.