Amer: (2009. dir: Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani) One of the many recent nods in the direction of Argento, a man who must be building up to a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, this is one of the most interesting. Very nearly sans dialogue, it is an examination of one female's internal erotic life, divided into three parts: we see her first as a small girl enduring a sort of Argento-colored nightmare, partly her own construction and partly inspired by sex and death and possible witchcraft around her, then in the budding beauty and burgeoning threat of adolescence, and again as a woman. The camera stays so close to her that her imaginings and nightmares are often indistinguishable from the external world, or anyway intermeshed with it. We see the traumas which shape her sexual neuroses and conflicts, then how they ultimately play out. It is an extraordinarily sensuous experience, and its final chapter, in which she returns to the dilapidated mansion which had been her childhood home, echoes not so much Argento as Polanski's Repulsion.
Berberian Sound Studio: (2013. dir Peter Strickland) A gentle, straitlaced English sound engineer goes to Italy to work on a horror film in the 1970s. A story of alienation building towards madness and told greatly through audio effects, its fascination is similar to Amer's, as they both channel a certain mesmeric effect through disorientation and shapeless sense of threat. Toby Jones is very good as Gilderoy, the Englishman in question, thrust into Existential Angst amidst uncouth Italians, his obvious vaunt-couriers being Gene Hackman from the Conversation and Blow Out's John Travolta. Or, again, there's an uncanny resemblance to Polanski's Paranoia ouevre, in which the hero finds himself alone and without foothold as he slowly slips away from sanity.
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