Tell me what it's about and the ending: SPOILERS WELCOME

Well, as far as I can see I thought it was about a bloke who goes to Italy from the UK to help make an Italian horror movie's sound effects.

But it's actually not about that, I don't think. I've read some theories on here that it's about one man's journey into madness. Everything you see is his imagination, including ALL THE CHARACTERS.

This came to me as a huge disappointment and there are a lot of pretentious people on here claiming the film is so advanced we the humble viewers do not understand the sysmbolism, and the deep meaning of it all.

I think it was a poor attempt to create something very unclear. It was an annoying film to watch and like you say the ending is so unfulfilling.

Truth be known it's a load of rubbish.

The contrast from his normal life and his usual films to the giallo stuff he is doing in the sound studio causes a problem in his head. He's also frustrated, bullied and homesick. Mentally, he starts putting himself in the film and the letter about the chaffinches being killed, and the bloody description, tips him over the edge. His making of the soundtrack to the film becomes a film to him, with his voice dubbed into Italian and the letter from his mother describing the death of the birds becoming the script. He becomes a torturer himself by torturing the actress with the sound. The film ends with him walking into the screen.

But it's really about the atmospherics and the creepiness rather than the narrative.

I see some people have commented that they think that everything that happens is in his imagination, or that he's writing the letters himself (although it's not actually his handwriting)and that he's killed his mother, but I don't think it's that complicated. However, the ending is meant to be ambiguous so you can take from it what you want.

It's probably not a satisfactory ending for many people, but I think having him actually kill someone would have been out of keeping with the rest of the film. Maybe it's just an arty homage to the giallo genre.


"I'm entitled. Simple. End of.."

There's no definitive answer as to what happens to Gilderoy throughout the film and at the end. He seems to 'go mad' or have a breakdown at the end but it's not clear if the first two-thirds of the film were a reality or not. Ultimately it's left with the viewer to make of it what s/he will.

Fatima had a fetish for a wiggle in her scoot

First viewing but my impression was that he is actually an Italian sound editor who has been working at the studio for years and who's dedication to his work in that particular genre drove him mad before the film even takes place.

His coworkers tolerate it because he is good at what he does, but even so they can get frustrated having to play along with his delusions, such as having just arrived from England to work on the next film. The secretary in particular has very little patience with him. As if she has to endure his delusions before. The producer (I'm assuming) keeps a very close eye on him too. Unusually so.

I could be wrong but I thought in the scene where he created the UFO sound he was clearly able to understand what the others were saying in Italian.

My other half had a completely different theory so I guess we'll have to watch it again.

The ending annoyed me. I thought the identity-fracturing would continue to get more intense and lead somewhere interesting. Instead, it just ends mid-stream without any sort of catharsis, or even a clue as to what it's all supposed to mean. Ambiguous endings do often work, but the way this film leaves absolutely everything open to interpretation seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. Feels a bit lazy. It's as though the director himself didn't really have a clear idea where he was going with this.

Still, a very impressive work. The sound design was utterly amazing, and the film's gloomy, hallucinatory aesthetic built up a sense of dislocation and intangible dread quite beautifully. Some parts actually reminded me of (a less grainy and more accessible) Inland Empire.

I look forward to watching it again.

I'll give my own interpretation, which may very well be wrong. I believe it to be a movie within a movie within yet another movie in which the unsuspected sound engineer is the star of a psychological cinematic documentary experience without his knowledge or consent. To my mind Gilderoy was an unaware participant in a psychological cinematic documentary experience at which the moviemakers and the crew's objective was to push Gilderoy towards a breaking point and film that gradual loss of control, which was essentially the movie we have watched.
Why have I made that reasoning? First of all because they chose a sound engeneer that sounded children's programs and pastoral documentaries. They believed that by placing him in an element with such a violent subtext as is an italian psycho-sexual and extremly violent supernatural horror movie they hoped that he would come to a breaking point and somewhat lose his mind, thus exploring the fragility of the humam mind and film it too. They added to the tension by hinting that the all production was shady (they made constant excuses not to reenburse his flight)and something dark and seedy was taking place in the studio, whose atmosphere was clasutrophobic and scary in itself. As if that wasn't enough they made one of the actresess pretend that she was abused.
The third thing that made me reason as such is the fact that the last minutes of the movie are completly dubbed in Italian, including Gilderoy's voice and the fact that right at the end he plays the supposed footage of the movie he made the sound for and there is nothing there, just the sound and no image watshoever.
If I am right and that is what the end signifies than you have a triple exercise in metaficiton in which you have a movie within a movie within a movie within a movie; that is, the movie Gilderoy went to make the sound for; the one who is being constructed at Gilderoy's unknowing expense - a kind of reality documentary that films his gradua reach of a braking point and finally the one we have just watched, directed by Peter Strickland.
That's how I view it anyway.

Not totally sure, but here's one theory that came to mind. Gilderoy is increasingly miserable as the film goes on. The unexpectedly violent and horrific content has a profound effect on him, until he eventually starts to fray and succumb to the tone of the film he's working on, imagining himself dubbed in Italian like the film's characters and becoming more callous and sadistic, as seen when he torments the actress with the sound in her headphones. The final letter from his mother, with its bloody description of the chicks' death, is what pushes him over the edge -- the violence of the giallo film has finally overtaken even the peaceful, pastoral scenes he holds dear, and he has a psychotic break. What happens to him, and to the other people working on the film, is anyone's guess.

There's no definitive answer to what happens at the end, or even what happens throughout the rest of the film. Everyone has their own interpretations (just look at the responses so far) and yet almost everyone has identified the most common thread (madness).

For me, there are several important "clues" that point the audience in a particular direction.

1) There isn't really a legitimate reason for TJ's character to have been hired to work on the film. He works out of a garden shed and his only credit was mixing the soundtrack for a local educational film. There is nothing to suggest that he'd be up to the task of mixing an entire horror movie, especially one in a foreign language.

This suggests that there is no trip to Italy, no production, etc.

2) He lives in a fully furnished flat. Not a hotel or studio accommodation, which would be expected if someone was working on a studio film at a time when the Italian studio system was flourishing. In his flat he surrounds himself with pictures and recordings from home.

Someone else suggested that the character never leaves this flat and the "production" scenes are all a figment of his imagination, which seems plausible.

3) The letters from home. In each of the letters his mother talks about the impending arrival of some chickens, his work on the educational film and how much she misses him. Throughout the letters she updates him on the arrival of the chicks, but in the last letter she says the chicks were viciously killed, probably by magpies.

Someone suggested that the TJ character is really institutionalized; that he's suffered a breakdown and is rationalizing his ordeal through the "production" as psychodrama. This would explain why his mother misses him. However, if he was in an institution recovering from a breakdown, his mother most likely wouldn't have told him (in such graphic detail) about the chicks being killed.

The death of the chicks is one many representations of death throughout the film, and the end of the film could even be interpreted as the death of the central character (he moves towards the light, which is a common notion of the afterlife in Christian religions).

My theory is that the letters are old, not recent, but the new of the chicks being killed had a profound effect on the central character (the letters even emphasize that the chicks were kept in HIS shed).

4) There was no flight from the UK to Italy. There's no record of it. Again, this suggests that his arrival is a figment of his imagination.

I do like the theory that TJ's character really was an Italian sound recordist who has a breakdown and everyone just humours him and goes along with his delusions, but I also think that pushes implausibility and that ultimately what happens is metaphorical.

5) The subject matter of the film. Religion and death. Torture and insanity. TJ's character is asked by the director if he believes in God. He doesn't give a sufficient answer, but he has a crucifix above his bed. He has an awkward relationship with women. His mother seems the only woman he's close to, but he only hears from her through letters.

The other women in the film are either "whores" or "victims" (consistent with Italian horror movies, but also Christianity) and the film within a film is also about women as whores and victims. From this, the scene where TJ willingly tortures an actress by passing high frequency distortion through her earphones might also be a potential clue to his state of mind.

6) TJ's notes. At one point, prior to the film disintegrating, we see a montage of TJ's notes on the sound mix. It's full of references to things we've already seen, but there are several references to poultry (the chicks again) as well as notes from the educational film that TJ worked on. This suggests that the story being depicted is really being constructed by the central character who identifies particular emotions (or emotional associations) through sound.

These are all just random thoughts based on a single viewing, but I'd say think about the film Santino is making - what it's about and what it represents to the central character - and see how the two strands coalesce.

Maybe the character is insane? Maybe he killed a woman and it drove him mad with guilt? Maybe he's already dead and is trapped in a purgatory type state where he is forced to keep repeating the same job over and over again? No one will ever know for definite, but there are a lot of threads for the audience to draw upon.