How fitting is it that Alex Noyer’s splatter-deafness movie, “Sound of Violence,” comes to us just a week after the release of “Spiral,” the latest chapter in the big bloody book of “Saw?” The two are kindred spirits, or more like first cousins, in improbable grisly violence, where the enterprising slasher ceremoniously slays their victims with immoderately complicated Rube Goldberg machines. Depending on what end of “Spiral’s” reception you’re on, this will either sound tempting or repulsing. “Sound of Violence” is so of a piece with the grimy bread-and-butter extravagance of the “Saw” movies that enjoying the latter increases your likelihood of enjoying the former.
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The “click-clack” you hear is the sound of every “Saw” partisan banging away at their keyboard to figure out where they can see “Sound of Violence” themselves, and every “Saw” detractor slamming their laptops shut and walking away. Maybe comparing the two does “Sound of Violence” no favors. They share in common a focus on exhaustingly complex kills, true, but Noyer’s film lacks any trace of moral judgment and cultural commentary in the “Saw” vein. This isn’t a story about one person taking on the burden of correcting society’s lapses in compassion and virtue. It’s about one person very baldly indulging their own selfish impulses for a few seconds’ worth of cathartic, awkward pleasure, and how a few seconds is never enough to sate their urges for long.
Scrubbing away all the preaching and pretense is surprisingly refreshing, even if the film is still pretty damn clumsy on its own merits. “Sound of Violence” begins in the past, where young, deaf Alexis Reeves (Kamia Benge) watches helplessly as her father (Wes McGee) murders her mother (Dana L. Wilson) and brother (Mataeo Mingo). Too late to stop him, she exacts a small token of justice for her family by burying a meat mallet in his skull, and spontaneously develops synesthesia. Years later, Alexis (now played by Jasmin Savoy Brown) has recovered her hearing, works as a teacher’s assistant while composing her masterpiece, a grinding electronic concerto comprising the screams and agonized cries of people she’s slain over the course of her life.
Seems that seeing sound provides a high that Alexis has chased since childhood, and music accompanied by pure brutality is her way of scratching that itch. The lengths she goes to for that brief, scintillating period of ecstasy are, to her credit, impressive. Alexis not only knows sound engineering like the back of her hand, but she also has a mind for gadgets and traps that’d make Jigsaw smile: A contraption that stabs, hacks, and cudgels every time she plays a note on her keyboard, a harp strung with razor wire to slice up the hapless harpist. “Sound of Violence” never lacks creativity. Noyer has a wonderful mind for over-the-top gore wrung from over-the-top set pieces and marries that lurid imagination with a good eye for expressing it. The best reason to see films like “Sound of Violence” in the first place is well-photographed viscera, after all, and if that’s the only reason one needs, then Noyer’s done his job.
But of course, there’s more to horror than artful carnage. Unfortunately, artful carnage is all that “Sound of Violence” has going for it. Much like “Saw,” the story’s as excessive as the gore. Alexis harbors a crush on her roomie and bestie, Marie (Lili Simmons), who naturally has no clue about Alexis’ unrequited affections and barbaric songwriting process; Noyer leaves this element ignored until the third act, effectively shoehorning what could’ve been a meaningful character detail into the climax. The police are on Alexis’ heels, too, and apparently have been for years without making any headway in discovering her identity or stopping her from killing again. It’s a lot. Given that the police presence here is ineffectual as a plot device and as a counterforce to Alexis’ mayhem, it’s a wonder they show up at all.
“Sound of Violence” cries out for a “less is more” approach. The basic conceit is robust, a character-driven horror narrative about a woman trying desperately to find her version of narcotic bliss, and doesn’t really need much more than that; it’d be weird if the police didn’t get involved at all, but it’s an obstacle that they get involved as much as they do, and shoving Alexis’ infatuation with Marie into the stretch of the film where there’s the least amount of space to explore it undermines the personal angle. This is the material “Sound of Violence” needs to give the bloodshed a purpose aside from making viewers feel all rumbly in their tummies – the human side of the genre, the qualities that invite us to care about all the poor saps being introduced to their deaths in the most horrible ways possible. Should all that gory grotesquerie come first? Sure. But should it come at the expense of substance?
Horror’s in a place where a new generation of filmmakers, plus incumbents and gatekeepers, are all laboring with and against one another to flesh out the space the genre occupies today. Some people want to elevate it. Some people want to interrogate it. Some people just want to make grungy movies for grunge’s sake. “Sound of Violence” can’t decide which direction to take, and winds up the poorer for it. For the rest, Noyer needs to go back to the drawing board. Even Alexis’ disability comes in a distant second to buckets of guts. His talent for making a mess is obvious. The rest leaves a few too many notes to be desired. [C-]
“Sound of Violence” is available now.