Seeking to recreate the euphoria she experienced during a horrific
incident in her childhood, a young woman turns to murder.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alex Noyer
Starring: Jasmin Savoy Brown, Lili Simmons, James Jagger, Tessa
Munro
The villains of slasher movies are usually motivated by some traumatic
childhood incident, often some sort of public humiliation or in the
classic early '80s slasher wave, witnessing their parents or siblings
having sex. Alexis, the villain/protagonist of writer/director
Alex Noyer's feature debut Sound of Violence, an expansion of his earlier short Conductor, suffers the worst possible childhood trauma when she sees her mother
and brother butchered by her PTSD suffering father, whom she subsequently
bludgeons to death. But every cloud has a silver lining. Previously deaf,
Alexis's hearing permanently returns as a side effect of the trauma. Also,
while smashing Daddy's brains in, Alexis experiences a delirious euphoric
sensation, a dazzling array of colours and lights dancing before her eyes.
Now an adult (played by Jasmin Savoy Brown), Alexis is determined
to once again experience such ecstasy. She's devoted her life to the study
of music and sounds, and is currently employed as a teacher's aide in the
music department of a college. This gives her access to the equipment she
needs for her unique project. Alexis is convinced that if she can recreate
the horrific sounds of violence she experienced as a child, she'll also
once again delight in that near orgasmic sensation.
Initially, Alexis tries some conventional means, recording the sounds of a
dominatrix whipping her prone submissive slave, but it fails to float her
boat. And so Alexis begins killing a series of victims in novel scenarios
and recording their death throes.
On paper Sound of Violence shares a similar premise with
Renaud Gauthier's Discopath, in which a young man is driven to murder by the four-four beat of disco
music. But in practice the two films couldn't be less similar. Where
Gauthier leaned into the absurdity of his premise, Noyer plays it with a
straight face. This works up to a point, particularly in the gruelling
flashback sequence that opens the film, but as Alexis's reign of terror
progresses, the movie gets increasingly silly. Alexis's elaborate murders
- which include tightening a harp's strings so much that they slice
through the harpist's fingers – and her ability to pull the wool over the
police so easily, would be more at home in something with the satirical
tone of American Psycho. Instead, Noyer aims for a Cronenbergian approach, going full
body-horror in a bravura climax, which admittedly features one of the most
striking images you'll have seen in the genre for some time.
It is possible to pull off this concept with a straight face, a recent
example being Jill Sixx's modern slasher
The Stylist. But where Sixx crucially gave us a sympathetic villain/anti-hero,
Alexis simply comes off as whiny and unlikable. It doesn't help that her
first victim is a homeless man, an act which immediately prevents us from
empathising with her subsequent homicidal journey. Like the recent
Rosamund Pike vehicle
I Care a Lot, Noyer makes his awful protagonist a lesbian, as though this will
somehow make her more sympathetic, but it feels like a cheaply
exploitative afterthought.
Just like Alexis, Noyer has clearly put a lot of thought into the
inventiveness of dispatching victims through audio related means, and his
film's set-pieces are certainly original and memorable. It's a shame then
that they're delivered in a movie that just can't seem to realise how
silly its entire premise really is and stubbornly refuses to play this
story for the laughs it should be inducing.
Sound of Violence is on UK/ROI
blu-ray, DVD and digital from August 30th.
