D/S: Peter Strickland. P: Mary Burke, Keith Griffiths. Cast: Toby Jones, Antonio Mancino, Fatma Mohamed, Cosimo Fusco. UK dist (DVD/Blu-ray): Artificial Eye.

A fannish homage to the outré Italian horrors of the Seventies, Berberian Sound Studio is very amusing in parts, demonstrates an obvious knowledge and affection for the subject it satirises (an obvious prerequisite lacking in so many would-be spoofs), and echoes Polanski and Lynch in its exploration of the paranoid labyrinth between imagination and reality. The plot is fairly basic: a British sound technician (Toby Jones) arrives in Rome to work at the Berberian Sound Studio on a hew horror film project, the brainchild of an erratic soi-disant “genius” director and his long-suffering (but similarly mercurial) producer, and—like Hackman’s Harry Caul in The Conversation (1974)—finds his grasp on sanity gradually slipping away…

Homages abound: there’s the whole “stranger in a strange land” element from Fellini’s segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), of course, but also (supplied by comical audio excerpts from the movie he’s working on) nods to Suspiria (1977), Patrick Vive Ancora (1980) and others. And let’s not forget the Lardani-style rotoscoped title sequence, backed by an aggressive music cue mid-way between Stelvio Cipriani and Goblin (the only part of Jones’s film project we actually see). Great fun for Italo movie geeks, needless to say. Jones is one of the few actors incapable of a dishonest performance, and his turn here as the awkward and introverted sound guy is never less than convincing; he’s at peace only in his private world of discrete noise, sounds divorced from their primary reality—which he then reassembles to create a new reality. Real-life objects take on a secondary identity, cabbages as stabbed torsos, mangos as squished cadavers; queasily, the camera tracks across the mouldy corpses of fruits and vegetables, as if exploring a mass grave.

But sad to say, there’s not really enough material here for a 90-minute feature. As with Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s impressionistic Amer (2009), Berberian Sound Studio would make a near-perfect 40-minute episode in a classy horror anthology; after an hour, however, it does start to drag. Its message is also rather muddled, with certain oddball elements thrown in simply for effect rather than thematic consistency. Does Jones actually exist, or is he a figment of filmic imagination? Much is made, late in the film, of Jones’s flight to Rome (never shown) being revealed as a possible fiction, but in that case how did he get there? Recurrent spider imagery invites us to view his character as trapped at the centre of a web of magnetic tape, a prison of his own making. Is he suspended in some kind of sound designer’s purgatory, forced to create foley effects for a revolting horror movie whose post-production never ends? Director Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy) isn’t quite sure, and nor are we. But even if the answers are unsatisfying, at least the questions are intriguing enough to warrant discussion.