Why Berberian Sound Studio is Still the Most Unsettling Movie About Making Movies

Most horror movies rely on what you see. A mask, a knife, a digital monster jumping out of a dark corner. But Peter Strickland’s 2012 masterpiece Berberian Sound Studio is different because it understands that your ears are way more vulnerable than your eyes. It’s a film about the psychological toll of creating nightmarish art, and honestly, it’s one of the most stressful things you’ll ever watch despite having almost zero "on-screen" violence.

Set in the 1970s, the story follows Gilderoy. He’s a mild-mannered sound engineer from Dorking, played with a sort of twitchy, quiet desperation by Toby Jones. He travels to Italy to work on a film called The Equestrian Vortex. He thinks it’s about horses. It isn’t. It’s a giallo film—a gory, hyper-stylized Italian slasher—and Gilderoy is tasked with creating the wet, crunching sounds of torture and murder using nothing but vegetables and foley equipment.

It gets weird fast.

The Giallo Connection and Why the Setting Matters

To really get Berberian Sound Studio, you have to understand the era it’s mimicking. The 1970s were the golden age of Italian horror. Directors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci were making movies that looked like neon dreams but sounded like butcher shops. Strickland doesn't show us the film Gilderoy is working on. We only see the opening titles—which are a perfect, pitch-perfect recreation of 70s genre cinema—and the faces of the voice actors.

The disconnect is the point.

We watch Gilderoy smash watermelons to simulate skulls being crushed. He hacks away at cabbages. He sizzles oil to mimic burning flesh. There’s something deeply dark about the technicality of it. You see the labor behind the screams. The film focuses on the "machinery" of fear—the spinning reels of tape, the flickering lights of the mixing desk, and the oppressive, windowless environment of the studio itself. It’s claustrophobic. You start to feel as trapped as Gilderoy does, stuck in a room where the only sounds are those of simulated agony.

Sound Design as a Narrative Weapon

The sound design in Berberian Sound Studio isn't just "good." It is the entire movie. Joakim Sundström, the sound designer, created a sonic landscape that feels like it's rotting. Because the film is about sound, the audio mix is incredibly dense. You hear every click of a switch, every hiss of the magnetic tape, and every wet thud of a vegetable hitting the floor.

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It’s meta.

You’re watching a movie about a man making the sounds for a movie, and the sounds he makes are what’s scaring you.

The film explores the concept of "acousmatic" sound—sound where you can't see the source. In film theory, this creates a sense of unease. When Gilderoy hears a scream through his headphones, he knows it’s just an actress in a booth. But as the lines between the film and his reality blur, those sounds start to feel autonomous. They haunt the hallways.

Why Toby Jones was the Only Choice

Could anyone else have played Gilderoy? Probably not. Jones has this incredible ability to look small without looking weak. He portrays Gilderoy as a man who is essentially a "sonic gardener." He’s used to recording birdsongs and documentaries about the British countryside. Dumping him into the chauvinistic, high-pressure world of Italian genre filmmaking is like putting a monk in a mosh pit.

His performance is mostly internal. We see the toll the work is taking on him through his posture. He sags. He becomes obsessed with his expenses and his mother’s letters from home, clinging to the mundane as his professional life becomes a parade of simulated atrocities.

The Breakdown of Reality

By the time we reach the third act, Berberian Sound Studio stops behaving like a traditional narrative. It’s frustrating for some viewers. If you’re looking for a "the killer was the projectionist" type of ending, you won't get it. Instead, the film itself seems to undergo a nervous breakdown.

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The celluloid seems to melt. The language shifts. Gilderoy begins to speak Italian, but not in a way that suggests he learned it—it’s more like he’s being overwritten by the film he’s editing. It is a psychological disintegration. The studio becomes a purgatory.

There’s a specific scene involving a lightbulb that is more tense than most slasher finales. It’s just a man, a desk, and the flickering realization that he has lost his sense of self. Strickland is making a point about the "toxicity" of certain types of art. If you spend all day, every day, perfecting the sound of a woman being tormented, does that leave a mark on your soul? The movie says yes. Absolutely.

How Berberian Sound Studio Influenced Modern Horror

Before this film, "meta-horror" usually meant characters who knew they were in a horror movie (think Scream). But Berberian Sound Studio introduced a more artisanal kind of meta-horror. It’s about the craft.

You can see its DNA in movies like:

• Enys Men (also very concerned with 1970s textures and isolation).
• Censor, which deals with the psychological impact of violent media on those who have to "process" it.
• The Lighthouse, in terms of its descent into madness and its obsession with specific, mechanical sounds.

It’s a "vibe" movie, but that vibe is "existential dread in a basement."

What Most People Miss About the Ending

People often complain that the ending is "confusing." It's not really a puzzle to be solved, though. It’s an experience. The film transitions from a literal story about an Englishman in Italy to a symbolic story about the disappearance of the individual into the medium of film.

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Gilderoy becomes part of the tape.

The final moments suggest that the "studio" is a closed loop. There is no Dorking. There is no mother. There is only the reel-to-reel, spinning forever. It’s a commentary on the obsessive nature of post-production. Anyone who has ever spent sixteen hours in an editing suite knows that feeling where the "real" world starts to look fake and the footage starts to look like the only reality that matters.

Actionable Insights for Your Next Rewatch

If you’re going to watch (or re-watch) Berberian Sound Studio, don't just put it on the TV while you're scrolling on your phone. You'll miss everything.

1. Wear high-quality headphones. This isn't optional. The film uses binaural-style layering that is lost on standard TV speakers. You need to hear the spatial positioning of the sounds to feel the claustrophobia Strickland intended.
2. Research Giallo aesthetics. Look up the posters for movies like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. Seeing the visual language Strickland is referencing makes the "unseen" horror of the film much more vivid in your mind.
3. Watch for the "Silvia" transition. Keep an eye on the character of Silvia, one of the voice actresses. Her treatment by the producers is the catalyst for Gilderoy’s moral collapse. It’s the most "human" element in a movie that is otherwise very mechanical.
4. Listen for the silence. The moments where the tape stops are just as important as the moments where it’s screaming. The "dead air" in the studio is where the real ghost of the movie lives.

This isn't a film for everyone. It's slow, it's deliberate, and it refuses to give you a "scary face" to point at. But as a study of sound, sanity, and the dark side of cinema, it is practically peerless. It reminds us that once you hear something, you can't "un-hear" it. The sound stays in your head long after the screen goes black.