ABSTRACT
Sound plays a crucial role in the construction of cinematic worlds by evoking spaces beyond the edges of the frame. In this essay, I examine the relationship between sound and image as it relates to offfscreen space in more or less conventional narratives before turning my attention to a complex example, Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). Rather than one cinematic world, this film offfers us as many as five, and sound—both at a formal and a narrative level—mediates them all. I demonstrate how the sound design in Inception not only helps to build its cinematic worlds but also to blur the boundaries between them.
