Sound of Violence (2021)

Directed by Alex Noyer. Starrin Jasmin Savoy Brown, Lili Simmons, Tessa Munro, Brian Huskey, James Jagger, James Wellington, Dana L. Wilson, Wes McGee. [R]

A young woman (Brown) whose family was murdered when she was a child experiences synesthesia when she hears expressions of intense physical pain, which leads her to experiment with creating and recording soundscapes through inflicting fatal injuries on other people. First-time feature writer/director Noyer shows a flair for surreal colors and mutant sound design, and for devising creatively absurd murder/torture set pieces, but his arty ambitions are offset by shallow psychology and murky motivations and for falling back on the occasional murder investigation cliché and hacky horror technique (e.g., ooh, it was o-o-only a dream…!). Makes an unsuccessful attempt to generate empathy for its psychotic protagonist—because her traumatic past excuses a sadistic murder spree?—and since her increasingly grotesque path is so underwritten, the movie doesn’t even get a chance to stick the landing on the whole “ends justify the means” angle when it comes to boundary-pushing art. Expanded from Noyer’s 2018 short film, Conductor.

45/100