Strickland: Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

More than any other genre, giallo dissociates the aural and visual dimension of film, extracting horror from the dissonance between sound and image to the point where there’s often no pretence that they were even recorded simultaneously. It’s perhaps appropriate, then, that Peter Strickland’s giallo period piece should take place at precisely that interface between sound and image, by way of Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a demure English sound engineer who's somewhat improbably brought to Italy to work on The Equestrian Vortex, a peculiarly gruesome and disturbing giallo film. Not only is Gilderoy responsible for the sound effects, which he gleans from an extraordinary range of everyday objects, but for the dialogue as well, effectively shooting the film for a second time on magnetic tape, rather than celluloid. Given that we’re never provided with the actual images from The Equestrian Vortex, the action tends to proceed sonically, rather than visually, like a soundscape that hasn’t been visually scored, or a soundscape that self-visualises as it plays. As much as Gilderoy might want to posit a logical connection between sound and image – it’s what marks him as a giallo amateur – it’s clear he’s operating at an incantatory interface as much as a technical interface, a space where sounds and images don’t cause so much as conjure each other. And the sounds he’s caressing and manipulating quickly start to take on an existence beyond The Equestrian Vortex, transcending the mise-en-scene before they’ve actually been incorporated into it. That's astonishing for him, but even more astonishing for us, much like witnessing a storyboard or screenplay skip the actual film to disperse into an ambient after-image, moving from proto-visual to post-visual like some of David Lynch’s most immanent dream-spaces. One of the most unusual effects of giallo’s schizophrenic sound-image discontinua is that they actually benefit from dubbing – dubbing adds something to them, somehow fulfils them – so it makes sense that Gilderoy gradually feels dubbed into the film he’s scoring, morphing imperceptibly in and out of Italian until, in true giallo fashion, it’s suddenly England (or English) that’s uncanny, the centre of all things Gothic. For all the grisly, gory possibilities lurking around the fringes of Strickland’s vision, then, the most terrifying prospects actually come from Gilderoy's previous films, a series of bucolic, BBC-esque studies of the British countryside, if only because they because they provide the only fully-formed images in this haunting visual vacuum.