Moments of precise synchronization in films are the key instances for pulling together physically unconnected image and sound tracks into an illusory whole—both in experiential as well as industrial terms. The ‘lock’ of audio and visual exerts a synergetic, what might be described as an occult, effect: a secret and esoteric effect that can dissipate in the face of an awareness of its existence. Film tends routinely to move between moments of synchrony between sound and image and points where there is no apparent synchronization. Approaching audiovisual culture from this, more abstract, perspective illuminates it in a form that removes the overly familiar aspects that have militated against sustained and detailed theorization of sound in films, and the notion of ‘sound films’ more generally. Drawing upon theories of sound originally developed by psychologists or sound theorists including Sergei Eisenstein, Pierre Schaeffer, R. Murray Schafer and Michel Chion, points of synchronization can be approached as a form of repose, providing moments of comfort in a potentially threatening environment that can be overwrought with sound and image stimuli. Correspondingly, the lack of synchrony between sound and images has to be characterized as potentially disturbing for the audience. Following this perspective, the interplay between the two becomes the central dynamic of audiovisual culture and its objects can be reconceived and newly understood along these lines. This is likely a ‘hard-wired’ process whereby we are informed about the space we occupy through a combination of the senses, and a disparity between visual perception of a space and its apparently attached sound (or vice versa) might have some direct physical effect, or set in progress an unconscious unease or dissatisfaction that the film will endeavour to develop and assuage as part of its essential dynamic. Indeed, such biological concerns about sound’s perception and its place in our survival likely have been transposed into cinema, even directly exploited by cinema for the purposes of affect. This paper outlines a larger project, one that wishes to look askew at film, as a speculation, a rumination. My discussion aims to be tentative rather than conclusive.