Masters of Horror: Episode 17 Sounds Like

While I have yet to finish rewatching the whole series, I'm pre-emptively giving Sounds Like the award for the single most depressing episode. It's terrifying, yes, but the terror is often overshadowed by how sorry you feel for this main character who wants nothing more than to feel peace. I think the fact that he's still alive at the end of the episode actually makes it worse. He's found momentary peace, but his suffering is still continuing.

Larry Pearce (Chris Bauer) is a supervisor at a call center. Recently he lost his son (Nicholas Elia), and has since become extremely cold and obsessed with his job. Larry has always had an excellent sense of hearing that helped him with his work, but in the wake of his son's death his hearing becomes better and better, until the most minor sounds cause him annoyance and eventually pain.

I'm not sure how much of this is supernatural, and how much of this is simply Larry suffering from some mental illness brought on by his grief. Much of the early episode could be explained by Larry losing his ability to filter out unwanted information, but by the end he's hearing things human ears shouldn't be able to make out, and seems to be experiencing physical pain from it. Furthermore, there are plenty of scenes that could easily be interpreted as Frank hallucinating, and others that really have no alternative interpretation.

The physical pain is backed up by the emotional trauma that comes with his increased awareness. As he becomes more aware of his surroundings, he becomes less able to navigate human interactions. He knows his wife (Laura Margolis) is planning a second child he doesn't want, and realizes that his therapist (Grant Elliott) is hiding a cigarette addiction. By the end of the episode Larry seems to have completely lost faith in any other human's ability to help him, and the only sound he wants to hear is the one he can't: his son.

The ending of the episode wipes out any remaining ambiguity that Larry was delusional. He's kills his wife, cuts off his external ears (which I'm fairly certain shouldn't have made him entirely deaf, but I attribute that to his hallucination), and is walking towards a sea that seems to have appeared at the end of his street. I imagine that, being unarmed, Larry is about to be grabbed by the police and spend the rest of his life in a mental institution, but that's really not the point of the story.

Personally, I interpret Larry's interactions with his wife as two equally delusional people coming into conflict. She claims to “know” that she's pregnant long before it should even be possible. I could easily imagine another episode telling the same story from her point of view that would be just as sympathetic. She's deluding herself in her need for human contact, while her husband is deluding himself in his need to be left alone.

I do recommend this episode. It feels almost like it's from another show. It's much more high-brow and intellectual than most Masters of Horror episodes. Director Brad Anderson is another contributor whose work I have yet to see, although I've heard wonderful things about both Session 9 and The Machinist. If they're up to the standards of this episode, I imagine I'm in for a treat, but I hope to God those films are less depressing.