Berberian Sound Studio, Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012, review The stand-out picture at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival is not a horror film so much as a film about the ontological status of fear: where it comes from, how it spreads, the ideal conditions under which it festers. Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio, only his second feature after 2009"s Katalin Varga, is an opaque, paranoiac thriller that is both set in and driven by the vanishing world of analogue recording. The film begins with fond, shallow-focus images of quavering VU needles, and in the background we hear the antique pop and crackle of magnetic tape. It is - it must be - the 1970s, and Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a taciturn, tweedy sound engineer from Dorking, has flown to Italy on the bidding of dapper director Gianfranco Santini (Antonio Mancino). Gilderoy, one of the best technicians in the business, has been summoned by Santini to supervise the creation of his new film's soundtrack: background music, dubbed dialogue and sound effects. Santini's film is a wincingly lurid "giallo" horror called The Equestrian Vortex which follows the misfortunes of a group of riding students who are tormented by a screeching mob of witches and, in one scene, a "dangerously aroused goblin." Stylistically, Berberian Sound Studio has almost nothing in common with giallo, but fans of Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Mario Bava et al will nevertheless have a field day. We are treated only to The Equestrian Vortex's opening credits, a frenzied blur of screaming skulls and sticky red ink, but even though we don't see another frame of it, its sadistic content comes across loud and clear. Much of Gilderoy's day is spent splattering marrows and ripping radishes to bits, in order to create noises to compliment Vortex's baroquely vile on-screen violence. As he becomes immersed in the work, the veg-ripping itself takes on a pall of cruelty: later, when we see Gilderoy pour oil into a scalding pan in front of a microphone, we recoil because we know exactly what red hot item of ironmongery the pan is doubling for and exactly where it is being thrust. Berberian Sound Studio is constantly playing skin-prickling games with causation and association: a match cut between a screaming gullet and a blender churning tomatoes into a gory pulp may be the best five seconds of any new film I have seen this year. Think of the Club Silencio scene in David Lynch's Mullholland Drive, turn it inside out, and that's just about the measure of it: where Lynch was disconnecting voices from their bodies, here innocent sounds are tied to repulsive, unseen actions, and the effect is just as unnerving. In a wry nod to Lynch's film, Strickland positions a bright red "Silenzio" sign above the door of the studio's recording booth, which blinks on and off as we hear the muffled screams and squelches from within. The studio itself is a claustrophobic, Kafkaesque place with a snug little coven of staff who all seem unable, or unwilling, to do their jobs with any degree of competence. I loved Massimo and Massimo, a gnomic pair of engineers who may or may not be related, and Tonia Sotiropoulou is a stand-out as an impeccably-sculpted secretary who is steadfast in her determination not to process Gilderoy's expenses claim for his flight. Immersed in all this it isn't long before Gilderoy starts to lose his mind, although exactly how this manifests itself on screen is simply too brain-sizzlingly inspired to give away here. Suffice to say, it is nowhere near as simple as reality merging with the film he is making: perhaps the closest analogue is Ingmar Bergman's Persona, a film in which the film itself starts to bubble and seethe under the psychological strain of its plot. I won't even pretend to have understood Strickland's ecstatically unhinged final reel after one viewing, but I do know that I want to see it again, as soon as is humanly possible. This is lip-smacking cinema, gamy and complex: if it sounds like something that might appeal to your palate, consider it unmissable.