Berberian Sound Studio

Directed by Peter Strickland

(Not rated)

***

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Peter Strickland “could well be a major new filmmaker,” said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. The 40-year-old writer-director’s “altogether transfixing” second film loses its way eventually, but it’s “fantastically eerie” from start to end. Toby Jones stars as a timid 1970s British sound-effects artist hired to add convincing audio to an Italian horror movie, and the actor best known for playing Truman Capote in Infamous “perfectly modulates the character’s reactions” as the work of smashing tomatoes, stabbing melons, and orchestrating actresses’ screams begins to unravel him, said Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times. We never see the film within the film, but it “colors every frame of Berberian” and every shot of Jones’s face. And though Strickland “tends to repeat himself,” he “knows how to provoke comic shudders” that linger in memory. Alas, he chooses a too-easy ending, using the creeping madness of his protagonist to bring in surreal touches as the film moves into its “far-fetched” final reel, said Tom Long in The Detroit News. “Oh well—Berberian is spooky right up to the minute it turns stupid.”