Sound of Violence (Movie Review)

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which one sense stimulates a reaction in an unrelated sense, such as seeing colors and shapes when hearing certain sounds. The right combination of sounds might stimulate a blissful, full-body fireworks show that puts party drugs to shame and can leave a person chasing the dragon for one more hit no matter what the cost to themselves or others; at least, that’s the premise of Alex Noyer’s EDM meets torture porn slasher flick Sound of Violence. Actual science may vary.

We meet Alexis (Kamia Binge as a child, Jasmin Savoy Brown as an adult) as a deaf 10-year-old who, late one night, creeps downstairs to find that her father, a PTSD-wracked war vet, has brutally murdered her mother and brother. Young Alexis retaliates by applying a four-on-the-floor beat to her dad’s skull with a meat tenderizer which, somehow restores her hearing while also triggering an intense rainbow-colored episode of synesthesia synched up to every smack. Years later, Alexis is a music student pushing the boundaries with her own sadistic form of experimental dance music by visiting a dominatrix to sample the sounds of whips on flesh and moans of pain. As the pain intensifies, the synesthesia returns which sets her on an ever-escalating chase for a bigger, more intense high, which can only come from inflicting more extreme pain.

At first glance, Sound of Violence might look like a high-minded example of what horror-haters have begun to call “elevated horror” with its electronic beats studded with bursts of color and themes of the interplay between trauma and creation and kink. It’s not, though. It’s actually a dumb, but fun old school slasher with some heavy torture porn influences. It’s got more in common with Pieces than Berberian Sound Studio. Although it is a fairly rote, gimmicky slasher in many ways, it does have a few unique tricks up its sleeve that don’t feel so much like subversions of the slasher template as a complete disinterest in even attempting to follow them. We see the whole movie through the eyes of the killer, not a victim, and everything is presented in a detached, amoral way. Alexis needs to get her fix and it doesn’t really concern her, or seemingly the film, that other people have to pay a cost in exchange for her pleasure. It’s also a small (possibly dubious) victory for representation to have a queer black woman as a slasher character whose murderous motivations are in no way tied to her sexuality, race, or gender. I’m not sure what mutant cousin of the Bechdel test that constitutes, but whatever it is, this movie passes.

A slasher is only as good as its kills, though, and fortunately Sound of Violence has some unique fun with its central gimmick. The main draws of this movie are the fun and inventive ways in which Alexis combines music and pain, so without giving too much away, let’s just say that this is probably the only slasher flick in which a theremin is used as a murder weapon. The kill scenes in this movie are icky and original enough that they are guaranteed to get an audience shrieking and squirming and talking about them afterward.

There are a lot of promising loose threads in Sound of Violence that never really come together. Alexis’s deafness, her synesthesia, her psychosexual sadism and her trauma are never really mined for anything more than interesting set dressing. At its core, Sound of Violence is, for better or worse, Saw with beats. It’s fun to dance to for an hour and half, but it’s not something you’re likely to throw on repeat.

Screened as a part of the 2021 SXSW Online Film Festival