Movies Ruined By Terrible Sound Mixing

The consolidation of the Academy Awards for best sound mixing and best sound editing into best sound has had the arguable upside of bringing more attention to the artistic aspect of sound design. It's unlikely that films like "Sound of Metal" and "The Zone of Interest" would have won back when the thought process for voters was still "Which movie does the most technically skillful job in the sound department?" as opposed to "Which movie has the most striking sound work?" That said, there's also been a downside: If sound mixing was already a field of expertise that got lost in the shuffle before, it's even harder to bring it due attention now.

For those not in the know, while sound editing covers sound effects and sound design more broadly, sound mixing refers to the process of balancing out the volumes, dynamics, and panoramic positions of the various different audio tracks in a film so as to create a complete and harmonious soundscape. It's a crucial, fundamental discipline of filmmaking; even if you don't quite understand what sound mixing is, you will definitely notice if you watch movies where the sound mixing is substandard.

On that note, we've compiled a list of 10 films where the sound mixing is so strange, unintelligible, or just outright bad that it actively compromises the viewing experience. From critical ADR failures to deliberately subversive filmmakers to low-budget indies that couldn't quite emphasize voices in the environment, here is cinema at its most sonically abrasive.

The most (in)famous recent example of a film that became notorious for its controversial sound mixing, arguably, is Christopher Nolan's "Tenet." Virtually every Christopher Nolan movie has a proclivity for what one might call dialogue-disinterested sound mixing; for decades, his films have been lambasted by some viewers and critics for prioritizing heavy, intense soundscapes of music and clanging effects, sometimes to the detriment of the audibility of conversations. In 2020's "Tenet," this artistic choice reached its apex; the slick reverse-time action blockbuster seemingly turned up every dial in the mix — the music, the sound effects, the background noise, even the room tone — while keeping dialogue at a stable, not especially high level.

As a result, while conversations in the film are relatively crisp and easy to follow in the quieter, music-free stretches, any scene involving any kind of noise is, indeed, noisy. There are pivotal moments in "Tenet" where you can barely make out what the Protagonist (John David Washington), Neil (Robert Pattinson), or any other characters are saying to each other amidst the action. And, in a movie with so much exposition and table-setting explanation of mechanics and mythology to get out of the way, that gets to be a problem. The inability to completely follow conversations, even if intended as a deliberate artistic choice by a director more interested in the human voice as a concrete sound effect than as a source of information, is a large part of why some had trouble following the entire "Tenet" timeline.

"The Keep," an adaptation of F. Paul Wilson's novel of the same name, is a curious object in film history. The second film ever to be directed by Michael Mann, this moody supernatural horror flick — which follows a Nazi infantry unit getting slowly torn apart by the supernatural force they've unleashed in an ancient Romanian stone citadel — was not well-received by critics or audiences when it arrived in theaters. But, on the way there, the film faced a rocky path; Mann's original cut was over three hours long, prompting Paramount to order a drastic shave down to 120 minutes, which was then met with lukewarm audience reception at test screenings, in turn prompting another trim to the 96-minute version that ultimately made it to commercial release.

This was all done in quite a rush, incidentally, and the most visible result of Paramount's haphazard tampering is that the sound of "The Keep" is downright disastrous. Conversations are randomly mixed at different levels, with some coming through so clear as to seem unrealistic or obviously ADR'd, while others are muffled as though coming from an old radio. Lines of dialogue drop to low volumes and then rise back to their normal levels mid-sentence. Crackles and persistent hums plague the near-entirety of the runtime. Most problematically, the Tangerine Dream synth score, while gorgeous, completely drowns out everything else at times; even legendary American critic Gene Siskel made a point in his 1983 review of noting it was impossible to understand the dialogue.

2009's "Public Enemies" took a similar aesthetic approach to Michael Mann's other 2000s films, leaning into the grainy unglamorousness of digital cinematography to create a sense of urgency and immediacy. And, perhaps to stir further discrepancy between the period setting and the distinctly 2000s vibe, Mann also did something unique with the film's sound. First, he experimented with scattering microphones around the set to capture the 1930s ambience from multiple perspectives. Secondly, he micromanaged the mix of dialogue to an unusual degree, requesting that different words within the same line — and sometimes even different syllables — be mixed at different levels, so as to mold actors' performances into his exact desired effect.

As with most Mann films, the success of the experiment depends on the viewer, but it's undeniable that the sound choices in "Public Enemies" make for a bizarre experience, to say the least. And not just because of Mann's go-for-broke approach: Sure, it's weird to watch action scenes that don't emphasize the plot-relevant audio and let it all just sort of lay there along with the background noise, and it's weird to hear Christian Bale's voice get lower and then higher within a couple of seconds. But it's even weirder to see Marion Cotillard show up in full 1930s attire, only for her voice to sound like it's being recorded in a low-budget '80s radio station, complete with metallic highs and rough blown-out lows. "Weird" is understandable, but some of "Public Enemies" just sounds downright amateurish.

What a difference 36 years make. When "Mad Max: Fury Road" went on a victory lap at the 2016 Oscars, collecting prize after prize for its instant-classic, medium-transforming foray into breathlessly kinetic post-apocalyptic action, two of the statuettes it took home were best sound mixing and best sound editing — only fair for a film that was, in all technical respects you could name, practically flawless. But, back in 1979, long before it was a huge Warner Bros. franchise, "Mad Max" was a scrappy low-budget Australian indie shot without permits – it wouldn't have happened without a little lawbreaking. And, for as much charisma as the scrappiness lands it, it's mostly a nuisance in the sound department.

The original Australian audio mix of "Mad Max" is actually impressively functional for a film that was shot in such slapped-together conditions. But it's still unmistakably green work, full of low, muffled audio that gets swallowed up in the music. The words being said by the actors are frequently hard to make out, blending into the environment noise even in music-free scenes, and both the voices and the sound effects sometimes feel perplexingly quiet and discreet, like they're not hitting hard enough — especially in contrast with George Miller's big, expressive images. Ahead of its release in the United States, "Mad Max" received a front-to-back American-English dub; while it certainly made the dialogue easier to hear, it did have the unfortunate effect of eliminating the Australian accents, which was a big part of the film's charm.

Every time a Hollywood blockbuster becomes an internet talking point for the sheer spectacle of its failure, one of the elements that sparks morbid fascination is the lack of professionalism. It's one thing for an indie made for sheer love of filmmaking to have erratic editing or sound channel imbalances; it's another thing entirely for those basic mistakes to be made in a $100 million Sony Pictures superhero tentpole. But, lo and behold, such was the case with 2024's "Madame Web," which became the feel-insane movie of the year for its failure to rise to even a baseline level of competence. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the film's sound mixing.

To address the elephant in the room first, the film uses ADR. A lot of it. Which, like a pop singer lip-syncing at a concert, is not at all a problem in and of itself — the problem is when it's noticeable. And, in "Madame Web," the ADR is absurdly noticeable; not only was little effort made to keep the re-recorded dialogue consistent with the bits actually recorded on set, but there are multiple scenes where Tahar Rahim's dialogue as Ezekiel Sims blatantly doesn't match the movement of his mouth. On top of that, the whole movie is mixed so awkwardly, with such little harmony between the dialogue and the music and the sound effects, that multiple scenes strike unintentional comedy gold for how much their chaotic soundtracks take you out of the moment.

"Tenet" is not the only Christopher Nolan blockbuster that sparked controversy over its handling of audio. Years before, "Interstellar" was criticized by some for drowning out the characters in the thunderous, overwhelming sounds of their space journey, as well as in the massive elegiac organs of Hans Zimmer's score. In the case of that movie, however, the artistic purpose was easy to glean; "Interstellar" is, after all, a film about being overwhelmed by the enormity of the cosmos, of time, and of human emotions. The more concerning Christopher Nolan dialogue diminishment debacle, arguably, came two years earlier: In 2012, several fans couldn't properly follow the last chapter in the journey of Christian Bale's Batman — because they couldn't understand what he or his co-stars were saying.

Tom Hardy's performance as Bane was singled out for a lot of criticism, which is understandable; not only does he talk in one of Hardy's most bizarre accents to date, but his face is covered by a mask that stifles and filters his voice — and Nolan makes a point of keeping the voice in question low and disorienting, just as Bruce Wayne and Bane's goons would be hearing it. It's not just Bane, though. The entirety of "The Dark Knight Rises" is happy to let the dialogue slip under the music and the ambient noise; there are conversations between Batman and Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman) that are as inaudible as Bane's soliloquies.

Back when there were still separate categories at the Academy Awards for best sound editing and best sound mixing, it used to be relatively easy for musicals and music-themed films with any kind of awards buzz to make it into the latter category. After all, mixing dramatically relevant music is one of the most impressive things there is in the field — not to mention that balancing voices and music is, technically speaking, the soul of the musical genre. "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Whiplash," and "Les Misérables" all won Oscars for sound mixing, for example. So it says something that, even while "The Greatest Showman" became one of the biggest live-action musicals of all time and collected an original song nomination for "This Is Me," it completely blanked out on any sound nods.

While the 2017 Michael Gracey musical features plenty of catchy music and positively jubilant numbers, its sound is mixed in such a way that the voices of the principal singers at any given point are often drowned out by every other track. Either that, or the completely opposite issue: Several times, the characters "sing" with clarity and volume that do not remotely match the action on screen, making the lip-syncing obvious even when the lips in question are moving correctly. It seems as if the music in the film was mixed to be heard on its own, then added into the scenes without any effort to integrate it properly.

The 1972 Ralph Bakshi animated film "Fritz the Cat," adapted from the comic strip by Robert Crumb, became notable as the first American animated film to get an official X rating (equivalent to the NC-17 rating prior to 1990). This was due to its unsparing depiction of nudity and adult themes. One of the things that made such a film viable in the early 1970s was the fact that it was an indie with a tiny budget culled together from various sources (Warner Bros. executives were horrified by an early presentation reel and pulled their funding).

It's very possible to tell that "Fritz the Cat" was made on a shoestring budget because, among other things, its soundtrack is a lot spottier than average for that era's animated films, with several hard-to-hear stretches. And the film's crunchy, noise-heavy sound mixing also speaks to the creative freedom Bakshi enjoyed in making it: In a nearly unprecedented decision, he recorded large portions of the film's dialogue out on the street in New York City with cheap sound equipment, often taping random city sounds or talking to random citizens and recording the ensuing conversations so as to include as much real life in the movie as possible. Reportedly, this caused friction between Bakshi and the sound mixers, who tried in vain to get him to re-record the dialogue in a studio. He refused, and the resulting soundscape feels very much like something awkwardly thrown together without much inter-department coordination.

Like several other directors on this list, Robert Altman took a unique approach to film sound that, even at its least successful, might be more accurately described as "controversial" or perhaps "abrasive" than bad. A fan of capturing the world in all its chaos and cacophony, Altman became legendary for his way of overlapping various conversations and having actors speak over each other as people do in real life — and for sometimes embracing unintelligibility as a result. In later Altman films — from 1976's "Nashville" onward, more or less — he and his sound team had a firm enough handle on their unique style to make the soundscapes raucous without skimping on clarity. But, in 1971, when Altman made "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," he hadn't yet cracked the code, technically speaking.

To be clear, Altman's 1971 revisionist Western is not a bad film, and that's largely due to the unusually vivid and naturalistic way it evokes the early-20th-century American frontier. But, in the sound mixing department, there was still a ways to go in terms of orchestrating all the various voices in Altman's mise-en-scène without letting the film's audio turn into a mushy mass of noise. The occasional downplaying of primary dialogue in favor of background conversations is intentional and fascinating, yes, but there are several stretches in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" where it's next to impossible to understand what anyone is saying, and not in an interesting, artistically productive way.

A David Mamet-written, Brian De Palma-directed crime drama starring Robert De Niro, Kevin Costner, and Sean Connery, "The Untouchables" screams — nay, blares out — prestige, in every action-packed set piece and every note of Enio Morricone's score. Which makes it kind of funny that the movie, for all its technical grandeur, often runs into the very puny problem of poorly-done ADR.

It's not just a question of acting; this is, after all, the movie that earned Sean Connery a best supporting actor Oscar for a performance in which he fluctuates through about four different accents, so strict realism wasn't ever really a requirement of the assignment. But the mixing of the dubbed-over dialogue is noticeably off a lot of the time: In scenes where various voices meld together into a consistent, crackling, organically textured background hum, a main character's voice will sometimes glide over it all without friction, suddenly transporting the viewer to a recording booth.

On top of that, while it's obviously understandable that De Palma would want to make as much room as possible for Morricone's music, the sound mix is sometimes a little too reverential to the score, which reduces Mamet's dialogue and the sound effects to tiny whirs, and/or becomes so deafeningly loud as to necessitate a sprint for the remote. De Palma exudes the confidence of a classicist filmmaker in "The Untouchables," but the sound could have used some additional polishing.