Peter Sarsgaard stars as a house tuner with an unusual relationship to sound in Michael Tyburski’s feature debut
THE SOUND OF SILENCE (Michael Tyburski, 2019)
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Peter Sarsgaard gives a beautifully gentle performance as a house tuner in Michael Tyburski’s feature debut, The Sound of Silence. Sarsgaard is Peter Lucian, an idiosyncratic New Yorker who is hired by people to investigate how sounds in their homes might be affecting them in negative ways, impacting their sleeping habits, success at work, and overall mood. Walking from room to room with tuning forks and a tape recorder, Peter tracks seemingly impossible-to-hear noise and suggests alterations that will change his clients’ lives, sometimes as simple as replacing a small appliance. He is also mapping the city itself, documenting buildings and street corners by the musical notes they emit. At the urging of his mentor, Robert Feinway (Austin Pendleton), he hires Samuel Diaz (Tony Revolori) to assist him as he prepares to publish his findings, something he prefers to do alone. Meanwhile, CEO Harold Carlyle (Bruce Altman) wants Peter to join his firm and turn his unique skill into a big-time money-making venture, but Peter has no interest in corrupting his unusual profession. When he hits a snag trying to solve the problems of his latest client, Ellen Chasen (Rashida Jones), he becomes obsessed, desperate to find the answer as his calm, even-keeled life suddenly becomes turbulent and disorderly.
Ellen Chasen (Rashida Jones) looks for sonic answers to better her life in The Sound of Silence
The Sound of Silence was expanded from rural Vermont native Tyburski and cowriter Ben Nabors’s award-winning 2013 short, Palimpsest. The film is reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1974 thriller, The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, an audio surveillance expert who becomes overwhelmed with paranoia, as well as Henry Bean’s 2007 drama Noise, in which Tim Robbins stars as a New Yorker on a one-man mission to eliminate the endless racket made by car alarms going off in the middle of the night. Cinematographer Eric Lin’s camera can’t get enough of Peter’s tender, delicate nature and slow, deliberate speech and movement, so sensitively portrayed by Sarsgaard (Shattered Glass, Kinsey), whether he’s laying down in a client’s bed, standing in front of Central Park’s Naumburg Bandshell with his tuning forks, or looking out at the vast city spread out below him, a symphony of strife, supplemented by Will Bates’s classically influenced score, that he believes he can cure. But even as he helps other people, he is unable to make personal connections in his own life, spending much of his time in his dark office, letting his answering machine pick up for him so he doesn’t have to talk to people on the phone, not knowing how to engage with the real world outside. The Sound of Silence, which boasts a strong indie cast that also includes Alex Karpovsky, Tina Benko, Bhavesh Patel, Tracee Chimo Pallero, Kate Lyn Sheil, and Alison Fraser, opens September 13 at IFC, with Tyburski, Nabors, and producer Michael Prall on hand for a Q&A following the 8:10 screening opening night. The film will also run September 20-29 at the Museum of the Moving Image, with Tyburski joined by physicist Janna Levin at the 4:00 show on September 22.
Earlier this year, Larry Fessenden’s Depraved made its world premiere at IFC Center as the opening-night selection of What the Fest!?, five days of twisted films and discussions that pushed the boundaries of the horror genre. Depraved, which does just that, is now back at IFC for its inaugural theatrical release. “Humanity does so love destruction. Depraved. That’s what we are. Utterly depraved,” Polidori (Joshua Leonard) explains in the film, a contemporary reimagining of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein involving the military, Big Pharma, and fatherhood. The smooth-talking Polidori (named for John William Polidori, an acquaintance of Mary Wollstonecraft’s who in 1819 published the first modern vampire story) is overseeing a cutting-edge experiment by Henry (David Call), who is seeking to bring life to the dead through surgery, medication, and therapy. (Dr. Frankenstein was named “Victor” in Mary Shelley’s book but “Henry” in James Whale’s 1931 movie.) Using body parts from multiple corpses, Henry, a former army medic in Iraq, has patched together a living being he names Adam (Alex Breaux). The final, key piece is the warm brain of Alex (Owen Campbell), who is brutally murdered moments after having a fight with his girlfriend, Lucy (Chloë Levine), in Brooklyn. Adam develops sooner than expected, taking a liking to Henry’s girlfriend, Liz (Ana Kayne), while Polidori uses this as an opportunity to speed up the deals he’s working on. It doesn’t go very well.
