Man alive, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is a strange little film. It stars the hapless Toby Jones as a mild-mannered sound engineer who travels to Rome to work on the soundtrack of a sinister giallo film and soon finds himself getting sucked into the movie's mystique and repellent atmosphere.
Technically, this film is a gem, with excellent sound design and good visuals; for a film set almost entirely in a sound studio, it's atmospheric and engaging, and it helps that the underrated Jones gives an excellent turn in a rare leading role. The problem with BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, then, is that it's one of those 'style over substance' movies where there's very little meat behind what's up on screen.
This feels almost like one of those films that's made up as it goes along. It starts off strongly, with a decent first half hour setting up the story, and what follows is oddly disturbing despite a lack of explicitness. However, around the halfway mark it starts to get heavy going, and the ending is particularly disappointing, failing to tie up or rationalise what's happened. I hate it when a film reaches this level of ambiguity; a bit of ambiguity works fine, but to this degree it's just a cop out, unfortunately.
