Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey Movie Review

Submitted for your approval: the strange case of Leon Theremin, a Russian scientist born in 1896 who emigrated to America, where he invented his namesake musical instrument, an electronic device that is played by waving your hands in the air. The Theremin's woo-wooooooo sound has been heard in hundreds of creep-out horror flicks and has been used in everything from Hitchcock's Spellbound to The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations."

Behind the music (ahem), we learn that Theremin's life was a strange one indeed. He married a black one during the era of segregation, was kidnapped in the middle of the night (back to Russia, as it turns out), and admits in candid though barely coherent interviews to being a KGB agent. (Theremin died shortly after the film was made at the age of 97.) Some of his other inventions are astounding, and his life's story is nothing short of bizarre.