Sound of Violence (2021)

Hustle & Blood Flow

Well, it’s been a week.

My review of Spiral didn’t win me any friends, and my review of Army of the Dead unleashed an army of Zack Snyder stans.

(Really it was one guy, but he was as obnoxious as a hundred people.)

I’ll concede to being a bit grumpy toward those movies. That tends to happen when I’m obligated to sit through continuations of series that I once loved, but whose subsequent iterations make me feel like I’ve been strapped to a chair and forced to watch an inbred lunatic piss on pictures of my kids.

The only feeling ookier than that is the humid chill of hypocrisy. I don’t actually have it right now, but I suspect that by the end of my review of Alex Noyer’s remarkable new horror movie, Sound of Violence, there’ll be accusations aplenty.

The film centers on a promising young musician named Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) who suffered two significant traumas at a young age. The first, a car accident, made her deaf. The second, in which she witnessed the brutal murder of her family, gave her a sort of Faustian synesthesia: the ability to experience sounds as intoxicating, otherworldly explosions of color—but only in the context of extreme violence.

Now in her twenties, Alexis lives with free-spirited roommate (and secret crush) Marie (Lili Simmons), who has just started seeing a dorky but sweet guy named Duke (James Jagger). Alexis works as a teacher’s assistant and spends her off hours tinkering with new ways to make music. The synesthesia, we learn, has been dormant for awhile, but is awakened during a visit to a dominatrix’s apartment. The increasing volume of a cracking cat o’ nine tails and the shriek of the bound submissive gives Alexis a taste. It’s not until she murders a homeless man that she savors the fullness of her dark gift.

What follows is a gruesomely absurd mash-up of Saw and American Psycho. Alexis targets people she deems unworthy of living and weaves their gruesomely melodic screams into elaborate instruments that emit never-before-heard sounds. As the bodies rack up, so do the suspicions of local law enforcement, Marie’s now-steady boyfriend, Duke, and, eventually, Marie herself.

No matter. Alexis is single-minded in her quest for artistic excellence, and Brown’s uncompromising performance is something to behold. She invites us to feel sympathy for this troubled, wayward woman of color, all the while chipping away her Bohemian Nerd Girl exterior to reveal a destroyer of worlds.

That all sounds very heavy, but Noyer balances his dark emotional roller coaster with ungodly wicked humor. Without giving too much else away, I’ll say that Sound of Violence climaxes with a twisted killer/final girl dynamic I haven’t seen since Pamela Springsteen toyed with Renée Estevez in the cult slasher/comedy classic Sleepaway Camp II.

Now for the hypocrisy—or what some might call hypocrisy.

How can I trash two movies for being over-Xeroxed retreads of classic genre films, while also heaping praise on something that ostensibly recycles elements from three other genre films? It’s simple: Spiral brought nothing new to the Saw franchise, except stunt casting; everything else about it encapsulated the reason audiences had begun to grow tired of the series ten years ago. Army of the Dead, as I laid out nearly point-for-point, is a plagiarised Aliens screenplay transplanted into a world where zombies exist—and Zack Snyder didn’t even bother to clean up the points at which the overlap falls apart.

Returning to the theme of music: If those films are cover songs, Sound of Violence is a sample-heavy remix that’s destined to take on a life all its own.

While it’s true that a lot of Alexis’ instruments resemble Jigsaw traps, the ends to which she uses them are completely different. Punishment for perceived character flaws is just a bonus; she truly is a creative force who feels there is only one last frontier to conquer. She embodies the spirit of Dr. Frankenstein, as portrayed by Peter Cushing in the Hammer films (great, another mash-up). Both characters are even more horrific on the inside than whatever creatures/contraptions they unleash on the tangible world, but the people writing their stories understand how empathy works.

As audiences, we don’t want to believe that a movie’s protagonist (even a disturbed one), is beyond redemption. Oftentimes, slashers and thrillers like this place the narrative focus on a hero/heroine who must defeat an unspeakably evil force—which gives us an excuse to revel in the carnage leading up to the monster’s defeat. So when the unspeakably evil force is the main character, especially in contemporary film (where, outside of the MCU, true heroes are all but dead), the impulse is often to turn that villain into a semi-sympathetic character. Taking a cue from the movies I’ve referenced positively here, Noyer plants his feet firmly and declares Alexis to be irredeemable—and compulsively watchable.

Sound of Violence is also, fittingly, a pretty exciting audio/visual experience. The depictions of Alexis’ synesthesia range from tricks of light to what I assume are combinations of in-camera, practical, and digital effects—all of which combine to create a sensory fascination that we want to know more about, almost as much as Alexis does. And while the sounds coming out of Alexis’ “instruments” are bloody awful, she synthesizes them into beats that could, in her universe, kick off a whole new kind of “organic” music craze.

So, yes, at long last I have a new horror movie worth recommending. Sound of Violence might be too gory for some; not gory enough for others. You may key into the bleakness of its occasionally awkward humor, or sit stone-faced through the whole movie. But you might just find yourself grooving to the beat of Noyer’s singular drum machine.

If not, that’s cool, too.

I’ll just be over here, dancing with myself.

Uh-uh-uh-oh.

Watch Ian’s interview with Sound of Violence writer/director Alex Noyer on the Kicking the Seat YouTube channel.