Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

Toby Jones stars as a mild mannered English sound engineer named Gilderoy, who travels to Italy to do the audio effects for a film called The Equestrian Vortex. Gildeory, who has spent most of his career doing sound work for documentaries and children's television goes into the project thinking this to be just a movie about horses, but instead it turns out to be a grizzly horror film. Working long hours, in a confided place, in a foreign country, simulating the sounds of torture for a group of difficult show people exerts a lot of strain on this simple man who lives at home with his mother and whose big hobby is ornithology. It's a great set up for a film, the problem is there is no real pay off, the movie  feels like it should be building to something but instead it just kind of ends. Gildeory slowly loses his grip on reality, he starts seeing bits of his life on screen, a letter his mother wrote him ends up in the dialogue of the script, and then suddenly he's speaking fluent Italian, his words now showing as subtitles at the bottom of the screen. However this is mostly just existential crises, there is not much real danger here, annoyingly little actually happens in this film, and Gildeory's character doesn't change much at all. While I thought the device of not actually seeing the horror film on screen worked for awhile, by the end of the movie I kind of wished they'd show us some of that film just for a change of pace. **