Berberian Sound Studio

Gilderoy, a shy English foley artist, is hired to do the sound design for a lurid 1970s Italian giallo called The Equestrian Vortex. He stabs cabbages for stabbings, pulls radish tops for hair. The film he is working on is never shown, only heard, and it begins to infect him.

Peter Strickland made a film entirely about sound and about the act of manufacturing horror: the screams are performed by actresses in the booth, the violence exists only as a recording, and Gilderoy's disintegration is conveyed through the medium he works in.

Toby Jones is superb as a man out of his depth in a world of Italian machismo and casual cruelty.

It is a giallo about making a giallo, and the last act, when the film stock seems to burn through and Gilderoy loses the boundary between the work and himself, is a genuine formal coup.

Nothing violent is ever shown. It is all in the sound.