BLOODY-DISGUSTING.COM Your best source for the latest horror news, reviews, interviews, and more... MOH Review: EP 2.4: Brad Anderson's 'Sounds Like' http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/7657 Print This Page Inside we've posted our third review from this year's Masters of Horror: Season 2 (all reviews), which airs every Friday on Showtime. Inside you'll find Tex Massacre's review of "Sounds Like", which was written and directed by Brad Anderson. The film tells the story of Larry Pearce - an ordinary man blessed with a gift of extraordinary supernatural hearing that drives him to the brink of insanity and forces him to take violent action to silence the horrific cacophony in his head. Sounds Like (MoH 2.4) Reviewed By: Tex Massacre 3/10 or 1 ½ Skulls In director Brad (SESSION 9) Anderson’s 2004 masterpiece of Hitchcockian suspense THE MACHINIST, Christian Bale’s character of Trevor Reznick suffered from an all-consuming obsession. Something inside Reznick’s life was literally eating away at him. In this week’s episode of Masters of Horror, Anderson once again revisits the psychological themes that have driven both of his prior films—the effect of exterior and interior stimuli on ones fragile psyche. Chris Bauer (THE WIRE) is Larry Pierce, a mild mannered upper management crony at a local computer tech service center. His whole life exists to monitor the “customer service” taking place one floor down. And he presides over his charges from a glass prison like an excited child examining his ant farm. But Pierce has a past—a historical tragedy that has been slowly picking at his addled mind. Now the sounds of happy employees solving twisted software problems, the click of phones and the tapping of keyboards is beginning to drive him mad—slowly and resolutely building to an ear shattering disharmony of symphonic destruction. Anderson’s take on the collapse of the human spirit is an eerie slow burn of a film that is unfortunately saddled with a shockingly unsympathetic leading man. Pierce is creepy. What’s going on in his head is creepy. His colleagues find him creepy. So, subsequently the audience finds him creepy. It’s really hard to get inside the self-destruction of your main character if no one is particularly interested in what happens to him—or better yet—if their actively rooting for him to lose it. Anderson’s supreme failure with the episode is simple—everyone’s annoying. To top it off, in some David Lynch-like paranoia scheme, Anderson seems determined to utilize the accompanying soundtrack of scratches and thumps to utterly unnerve the viewer. This might serve to affect some, but I found it grating—which I concede is likely the point—but never the less vastly adds to the excruciatingly measured running time. Like all maximum build-up plot devices, ultimately the film must reach its appropriate climax. In Anderson’s film this flash is in the final chilling moments, as Larry Pierce’s life comes crashing around the realization that the end is inevitable. It’s in this, long in the wings instant, that the resolution of the story works wonderfully. It’s also exactly the ending the viewer hopes and prays for and it’s shot beautifully. It is also equally tragic that such a gratifying conclusion be attached to such a disappointing project. To say that culmination is all worth it in the end is a gross misrepresentation of the unqualified boredom that lead to the moment. Clearly Anderson knows how to do a mood film but SOUNDS LIKE is everything that worked in THE MACHINIST done wrong. Whether that comes of Anderson adapting source material that is not his own (having been based on the short story by Mike O’Driscoll) or from a lapse in judgment regarding pace and soundtrack, one thing remains certain, the filmmaker’s past performances more than make up for, but still do not dismiss, a dreadfully mediocre addition to the Masters oeuvre. Source: http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/film/1102