Critic Reviews

It is one of the year’s very best films, a great, rumbling thunderclap of genius.

Director Peter Strickland brilliantly ratchets up the tension without showing a single frame of the grisly film.

Utterly distinctive and all but unclassifiable, a musique concrète nightmare, a psycho-metaphysical implosion of anxiety, with strange-tasting traces of black comedy and movie-buff riffs. It is seriously weird and seriously good.

Strickland' command of tone, aided by Oscar-winning "Slumdog Millionaire" editor Chris Dickens and, of course, sonic wizards Joakim Sundstrom and Steve Haywood, is masterful, jarring and discombobulating the viewer as Gilderoy's mind unravels.

Icily disquieting rather than scary, the film is less an exercise in narrative than in tonal mastery.

Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio is one horror film that opts to skip the usual frolic among those metaphorical monsters in favor of a deeply unsettling dive into the subconscious.

On the surface, Peter Strickland's film is an amusing black comedy that parodies the horror movie's continual status as the cultural black sheep of the cinematic landscape, but the filmmaker is most prominently concerned with painting a sonic portrait of alienation.

Though “Berberian” bogs down a bit in its infernal spiral, Strickland proves himself to be a rising talent — a master of sound and fury both.

Berberian Sound Studio constructs a perpetually strange, unseemly series of events overshadowed (and sometimes consumed by) the spooky movie-within-a-movie that hangs over every scene.

Not a drop of blood is spilled in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. Even so, Italian-horror buffs may feel a flush of nostalgia watching this bewitching genre whatsit, which manages to evoke the crimson-splashed shockers of the 1970s without so much as a single frame of actual carnage.