Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) lost her hearing as a child, but a brutal trauma gave her that sense back but with it came a swirling, beautiful array of colours (a real-life condition called synaesthesia). As an adult, she teaches music but has a real passion project: to create sounds that will provoke the same display of colour as she felt while bashing her father over the head with a meat tenderiser. The sounds she records come from a violent source, a BDSM session, for example. When she’s told her hearing could go again at any time, she ramps up the intensity of the audio brutality to a murderous extent.

The debut feature of writer/director Alex Noyer, Sound of Violence, has an interesting premise that has plenty to recommend it. The story treats the obsession of Alexis to complete her magnum opus as an addiction rather than a passion. Something that consumes and of which nothing good will come. A truly disturbing moment in a pretentious art gallery involving a harp player who’s been laced with a psychedelic drug and manipulated to give pleasure to Alexis is genuinely horrific. And it’s this lack of empathy with others that rings true with the drug analogy.

Jasmin Savoy Brown is brilliant as the detached killer, but while it’s easy to believe the musical talent she has, the elaborate devices she concocts to get her sounds recorded are likely to be out of her range.

Often stunning visually and as you would expect, it boasts an intense sound design, it’s a film that challenges as much as it rewards.

Dazzler Media presents SOUND OF VIOLENCE on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital from August 30th