Taglines: Her music kills.
Sound of Violence Movie Storyline. Alexis recovered her hearing during the brutal murder of her family when she was ten. The visceral experience awakened synesthetic abilities in her and started her on an orphaned path of self-discovery through the healing music of brutal violence. She goes on to pursue a career teaching and experimenting to find new sounds.
She is supported and loved by her roommate Marie who is unaware of the dark secrets behind Alexis’ unique music and the part she unknowingly plays. Faced with the likelihood of losing her hearing again, Alexis escalates her pursuit of her masterpiece through gruesome sound experiments and devastating designs. She won’t let anything stop her not even love.
Sound of Violence is a 2021 Finnish-American slasher film written and directed by Alex Noyer in his directorial debut, inspired by his short film Conductor. The film stars Jasmin Savoy Brown as a formerly deaf girl who goes on a killing spree after witnessing the murder of her family.
The film had its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival on March 19, 2021 as part of the Midnighters section. On February 11, 2021, it was announced that Gravitas Ventures had acquired North American distribution rights to the film with a release date of May 21, 2021. The film was given a limited theatrical release as well as a simultaneous digital release via premium video on demand.
Film Review for Sound of Violence
Experimental musician, DJ and teacher’s assistant Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is working on a seriously killer track. But the high she is chasing, in writer-director Alex Noyer’s uneven but often inventively grisly feature debut, is not that of pop stardom or peer admiration. Instead Alexis, due a condition whereby she experiences the sounds of human pain as a glorious starburst of color and pleasure, is attempting to knit her disorder into a sonic artpiece, no matter the rising bodycount of her “instrumentation.”
With its themes of creative obsession and trauma recycled as psychopathy, not to mention Alexis’ synesthesia giving license for lurid, semi-abstract, technicolor visual sequences, “Sound of Violence” boasts perhaps the greatest giallo premise that Dario Argento never dreamed up. It’s just a shame that Noyer decides that it isn’t enough. The spectacularly gruesome and grotesquely elaborate murder scenes do ample justice to even the most revered of its slasher forebears, but the procedural elements feel stilted, and despite a lead performance that oozes empathy as much as her hapless victims ooze blood, the emotional impact is barely discernible: an ebbing heartbeat.
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The latter is particularly disappointing because the film gets us on Alexis’ side in the most visceral way possible, spooling back to a fateful event in her childhood (the younger version is played very sweetly by Kamia Benge). Deaf since an accident some years earlier, the little girl regains her hearing in the same moment she discovers her haywire, multi-sensory reaction to the sound of mutilation, when she takes a meat hammer to her father’s head, as he is in the act of bludgeoning her mother to death.
Eighteen years later, Alexis is an outwardly well-adjusted, if withdrawn young woman who only seems animated in two environments: teaching a college seminar about her borderline mystical philosophy of percussion, and hanging out with her friend, flatmate and stealth crush Maria (an appealing Lili Simmons).
Maria, who has recently started casually seeing Duke (James Jagger), is also a music student with a knack for engineering, and she’s innocently helping Alexis with her sonic art project by wiring special equipment, and accompanying her to some pretty outré recording sessions. During one, a dominatrix inflicts pain on a client, and Alexis experiences the tantalizing beginning of her synesthesia — here rendered in flares of hot pink shimmer and spirals of neon smoke darting and uncoiling in the air all around. But Maria and the dom hit the brakes once blood is drawn and the sub taps out, despite Alexis’ fervent goading to go further.
It’s obvious she needs to hear more extreme suffering to experience her high, which has a trippy, addictive quality — and that she’ll have to do it alone. Also, it needs to be quick as it’s cursorily explained that she may be about to lose her hearing again — a ticking clock on her subsequent actions that could have been better developed as a tension-inducing mechanism.
Soon she’s dispatching a series of unwitting victims in a variety of fantastically sordid, intricate ways that reveal the hitherto unsuspected lethal potential of a drum machine, a theremin and a harp whose strings are jerry-rigged to fingertip-shredding tautness. These extravagant death scenes are also where Noyer’s team’s craft shines best, especially Daphne Qin Wu’s slick photography, and the music, by Jaakko Manninen, Alexander Burke and Omar-El Deeb, which sounds appropriately industrial-slaughterhouse. But despite the rigorous planning and construction that has to go into these murders, Alexis is oddly blasé about their cover-up, and soon the trail of bodies attracts police attention in the form of Detective Fuentes (Tessa Munro), which is bad news for Alexis, and for the film.
Outside of its terrific deaths, there’s plenty of thematic richness in “Sound of Violence,” if Noyer had wanted to go the “elevated horror” route: Alexis’ plight could be seen as a kind of pact with the devil whereby she regained the world of sound but must lose her own soul in its pursuit thereafter. But this would require a more interiorized, subjective, descent-into-madness vibe than the equivocal script is willing to pursue.
Instead, we get a rather plodding side dish of detective sleuthing — which can feel like the actors have stumbled onto the set of “Berberian Sound Studio” from the “NCIS” lot next door. And while the editing, by Hannu Aukia and Vertti Virkajärvi is excellent at establishing the tempo within a sequence it’s less so over the movie as a whole, which, ironically for a film about music, lacks a proper dramatic crescendo. It all suggests a certain indecision over whether “Sound of Violence” is designed to be a (loosely) real-world psychological thriller, or a high-concept video nasty. Either one of which, Noyer clearly has the ingenuity and dexterity to pull off — just maybe not both at the same time.
Sound Of Violence (2021)
Directed by: Alex Noyer
Starring: Jasmin Savoy Brown, Kamia Benge, Lili Simmons, James Jagger, Tessa Munro, Dana L. Wilson, Wes McGee, Mataeo Mingo, Corsica Wilson, James Wellington, Brian Huskey
Screenplay by: Alex Noyer
Production Design by: Gillian Chance
Cinematography by: Daphne Qin Wu
Film Editing by: Hannu Aukia, Verti Virkajärvi
Costume Design by: Annette Aispuro
Art Direction by: Kevin Boylan
Music by: Jaakko Manninen, Alexander Burke, Omar El-Deeb
MPAA Rating:
Distributed by: Gravitas Ventures
Release Date: March 19, 2021 (SXSW), May 21, 2021 (United States)
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