SXSW 2021: Sound of Violence
The award for one of the most gruesome horror movie kills—actually, three of the most gruesome horror movie kills—in recent memory goes to writer-director Alex Noyer’s delightfully inventive picture Sound of Violence. It stars Jasmin Savoy Brown as Alexis Reeves, a young teacher’s assistant with a passion for music and a tragic past. Deaf from a young age, at 10, her father (Wes McGee) brutally killed her mother (Dana L. Wilson) before Alexis retaliated, killing him. This act of violence triggers a synesthetic episode mixing up her experience of retribution with a profound flurry of color and texture. And we later learn that, miraculously, the event coincided with the restoration of her hearing. One night, when hunting for sounds with her roommate and fellow TA, Marie (Lili Simmons), the sounds of cuts and whipped flesh in a staged bondage session sets off her synesthesia once more. It sets her on a quest to record true pain and violence to sate her need for, well, the title says it all, the sound of violence.
If there is one thing Noyer does right, it is find inventive and sublimely ludicrous ways to kill Alexis’s victims. There is a spectacular torture device, early on, hooked up to Alexis’s mix table which editors Vertti Virkajärvi and Hannu Aukia expertly cut between, effortlessly obscuring the nastiest bits of violence only to highlight Alexis’s euphoric, artistic trance. It is an absurd sequence, only outdone by the escalation of later kills, but it sets the tone and tempo for the rest of the picture. This is a movie at which we are meant to chuckle as much as we are meant to wince. On her heels is a team of detectives who rummage through the clues, remarking how elegant and distinctly bizarre Alexis’s efforts are. This is one of the first areas where the film falters. Their inclusion is understandable, without the police, the messiness of Alexis’s crimes might seem a tad too easy. But, the way Noyer writes them, stern and deathly serious clashes with the inherent silliness of the film elsewhere. It is almost as though an episode of CSI has been frankensteined on to the film and it interrupts the delicate tonal balance Noyer and his cast craft elsewhere, even if it is an understandable break from Alexis’s sociopathic antics.
The second thread accompanying the grisly murders is Alexis’s relationship with her roommate, Marie. Alexis harbors unrequited love for Marie, while Marie obliviously dodges signs left and right, constantly inviting her boyfriend Duke (James Jagger) over. The shoehorning in of a romantic subplot might have been ill-advised, but Noyer develops the thread so well, integrating it into the climax of the whole picture, that it ultimately works. Though, to spoil how and why it works and works so well, would be to ruin Sound of Violence’s best surprises. All of this succeeds on the backs of both Jasmin Savoy Brown and Lili Simmons’s wonderful performances. The two have a chemistry that slips between comfortable roommates and something more effortlessly and it is in that space that they find the film’s best dramatic work. None of the emotional wires crossing feels contrived in the least bit and the ways in which the film gradually brings the dramatic irony of their missed connections to a head is certainly surprising and sublimely weird.
Where I do have reservations about the film is in how it balances its schlocky premise with its exploration of trauma. Exploration of trauma and the use of trauma as a cheap narrative device in horror is nothing new. I don’t particularly have a problem with how Sound of Violence sets out to use the psychological aftermath of Alexis’s childhood trauma as an impetus for her current day murdering spree. What I do find head-scratching, though, is how Noyer leverages the conventions of traditional drama, in which we would be expected to empathize with Alexis’s pain, along with the conventions of horror, in which the suffering of Alexis’s victims is fodder for delight at the blood-sport of it all. Both work individually. But the two halves of the narrative feel dissonant in a way that Noyer never truly resolves. Jasmin Savoy Brown certainly does an expert job of weaving between these two halves of Alexis. It’s a tightrope walk that she pulls off with grace. But, aesthetically, visually, there’s an irreconcilable clash between the gauzy haze of Alexis in a drama about the aftershocks of childhood trauma, and the lucid, violent cuts and vibrant, sanguine reds of Alexis in a schlocky horror picture, which asks us to root for her budding serial killing.
On their own, both of these halves of a larger whole work, and work marvelously. But, in composite, by the end, I was left unsatisfied by how loose the stitching holding them together remained. I can’t tell you how Noyer could have married the two pieces together better; it is a difficult task. But, it left me wondering if there was an underlying synergy between these two parts that Noyer was going for, but which was ultimately lost in the final edit. It’s both a small and a large problem. Taken at a micro-scale, this movie works brilliantly. The picture is excellently performed, is handsomely mounted, and, crucially, sounds fantastic. But, taken at a macro-scale, I’m left with questions about the overall cohesion of the disparate pieces that prevent me from recommending it enthusiastically. Still, if all you want is fun kills, you’ll likely be surprised at how taken you are by the underlying drama. If all you care about is the story of unrequited love, you might find yourself cackling at the sheer inventiveness of the brutality on display. I just wish I could say both halves enhanced one another in a way that made the film a tighter package as a whole.
