100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by
Director Peter Strickland brilliantly ratchets up the tension without showing a single frame of the grisly film.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
88
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.
80
With a debut film, Katalin Varga, shot entirely in Hungarian, Strickland isn't one for the easy option. This excellent follow-up plunges into equally unusual terrain with similarly pleasing results
83
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.
90
Icily disquieting rather than scary, the film is less an exercise in narrative than in tonal mastery.
80
Strickland’s nuanced, atmospheric, ambiguous movie transcends genre.
91
The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton
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.
100
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
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.
100
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
It is one of the year’s very best films, a great, rumbling thunderclap of genius.
80
Time Out London by Tom Huddleston
Berberian Sound Studio is like nothing before – and whether or not it ‘works’ seems almost irrelevant. In this era of cookie-cutter cinema, Strickland’s deeply personal moral and stylistic vision deserves the highest praise.