Few people would accuse Christopher Nolan of lacking ambition. But listening to Ludwig Göransson’s score for Oppenheimer, with its flurries of tremolando strings, tenderly arpeggiating harps, and surging orchestral minor chords, one thing becomes clear: most of this music could have been written, recorded, and slapped on a grandiose prestige picture any time in the last fifty years.
Nolan’s blockbuster is not alone in this, and it’s not an issue confined to the year’s studio tentpole releases, either. Both Talk To Me and No One Will Save You, otherwise innovative lower-budget genre films with plenty of good ideas between them, are nonetheless let down by safe, overly familiar scores. The blame almost certainly isn’t to be laid at the feet of the composers. Even talented musicians like Bobby Krlic can end up producing middling fare when hemmed in by the wrong picture (witness the Midsommar [2019] composer doing his best Stranger Things impression all over the soundtrack of Blue Beetle). The problem is likely that most filmmakers are far less interested in making their film sound interesting than they are in making it sound like a movie. Filmmakers reach for big cinematic gestures—swooping strings, dramatic stings, and militaristic fanfares—as a source of prestige. It’s a kind of musical bloviating that lends everything this veneer of slick professionalism or maudlin sentimentality when subtler, stranger sounds would likely have been more effective.
Happily, the last few years have witnessed a resurgence in original, experimental music for the big screen. Notably, many of the artists responsible for this new wave come from outside the world of traditional film scoring. Mica Levi already had an active career both as a concert composer and a performer, initially with the experimental pop group Micachu & the Shapes, and later writing for adventurous classical soloists like Oliver Coates and Eliza McCarthy. But their scores for Under the Skin (2013) and Jackie (2016) have been among the best of the last decade. Little surprise then, that her reunion with Under The Skin director Jonathan Glazer for The Zone of Interest has proved one of the most exciting soundtracks of the year.
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023).
There is nothing traditional about the sound of The Zone of Interest. For the vast majority of the film, there is no underscoring whatsoever (though later on there are these ominous throbs that burst in and interrupt the action every now and then, each one like a punch in the gut). Most of the time, when we hear music, it is over a monochrome black or red screen. These black-outs feel like so many punctures in the veneer of bourgeois respectability erected by the family at the film’s center. While their lives seem normal, they in fact live on the very border of hell. And the music we hear is terrifying: a lurching, vertiginous blend of choral voices, strings and electronics that judders and jerks with furious intensity. If the standard role of the motion picture soundtrack is to create an illusion of continuity in a fundamentally discontinuous medium, then Levi here is doing the precise opposite of that to brilliant effect.
Bobby Krlic may have followed a well-trodden path with the analogue synth-based score for DC’s latest misfiring superhero film, but his music for Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid is something else entirely. Like Levi, Krlic was well-established as a recording artist before he started working in film, with a trilogy of albums under the name the Haxan Cloak threading a deft line between electronic drones and the darkest corners of folk. The score for Beau Is Afraid may be his most ambitious work yet, engaging a whole battery of extended orchestral techniques, quaking synths and howling sax lines (from the American avant-garde jazz musician Sam Gendel) to immerse the audience in the fractured mindscape of the film’s terrified title character. It’s an epic journey and the music does a lot of the driving.
One of the most compelling film scores in recent years was Eiko Ishibashi’s ruminative piano-led soundtrack to the Oscar-nominated Drive My Car (2021). For over twenty years, Ishibashi has been a salutary presence on the global experimental music scene, consistently elevating everything she contributes to, whether playing piano with Merzbow or drums with Jim O’Rourke or almost everything on albums of her own songs and compositions for hip labels like Drag City and Black Truffle. Her second collaboration with Drive My Car director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, this year’s Evil Does Not Exist, came about when the composer requested some visuals to project during her live concerts. As Hamaguchi started to work on the piece, he grew interested in the characters populating his images, the inhabitants of a small mountain community, eventually developing the work into a proper feature film charting their struggle against a group of developers. But he still kept the opening credit lines for director and composer side by side, like equal partners. We hear Ishibashi’s trademark skittering cymbals, but they are quickly overwhelmed by a rich swell of strings that reminds me of Georges Delerue’s score for Contempt (1963). Before long, the music takes on the feel of a character in its own right, as important to the emotional journey of the film as any other.
Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg, 2022).
At the other end of the affective scale, Tim Hecker’s (mostly) electronic score for Infinity Pool is icily efficient. The Canadian producer has been releasing records since the 90s, first making techno as Jetone, later turning to more expansive, ambient sounds in collaborations with Ben Frost and Jóhann Jóhannsson amongst others. His music for Brandon Cronenberg’s latest dark satire brings a woozy intensity to the story with its raw-sounding string glissandi and death march pulse beat. Everything sounds like it’s been slowed down, possibly chemically. There are backwards shuffling sounds, underwater rave noises. It all sounds dense and taut and highly abrasive, with additional gristle and heft added to the electronics by the French horn playing of occasional Arcade Fire collaborator Pietro Amato. It’s a cold sound befitting Cronenberg’s cold and listless characters. This burnishing of electronic timbres with the physicality of real brass and real breath seals the viewer claustrophobically in the film’s uncanny eternal holiday camp.
Though poles apart in many respects, both Infinity Pool and Poor Things set their respective tones through striking combinations of electronic and acoustic means—albeit in markedly different ways. Much of what sells the bizarre world of Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film comes from the kooky chamber music of Jerskin Fendrix. At once hyper-modern yet also strangely old-fashioned, childlike yet wise beyond its years, it sounds rather like Erik Satie played by badgers. Fendrix has never worked on a film before and Lanthimos has never worked with a composer before, but the director chose Fendrix after hearing his 2020 solo album Winterreise. The English musician composed most of the score before shooting began (and appears himself as a musician in one scene in the film), recording each instrument individually and applying a great deal of processing. We hear the timbres of familiar instruments rendered strange by, for example, pitching a flute down to the register of a tuba. Like much of this carnival-esque film, it is a sound world we recognize but can’t quite place, forcing us to listen afresh.
All five of these composers began their careers outside the film industry and remain relative newcomers to the job. Many of them are using traditional instruments in unusual ways or combining acoustic and electronic instruments in ways that blur the distinction between the two. Aside from Poor Things and Infinity Pool, each film marks an ongoing collaboration between composer and filmmaker (for Glazer and Levi, it’s their fourth film, after Under the Skin and two shorts). Sound and image feel especially entwined, bespoke partners born of mutual esteem between collaborators, not alienated laborers on a content factory floor. This is music that is never content to merely sit in the background and subtly—or not so subtly—manipulate the audience’s emotions. It is upfront and in your face. But, oddly, some of the most striking musical experiences in the cinema this year came during films without any music at all.
Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022).
Micro-budget thriller Skinamarink has no credited composer and no licensed sync tracks. What it does have is a sparse patchwork of shuffling, whispering, and radio static throughout that recalls both YouTube ASMR videos and the kind of ultra-minimalist sound art produced by the likes of Steve Roden, Jeph Jerman, or some of the contemporary composers associated with the Wandelweiser Group. Even better was Filipino director John Torres’s Room in a Crowd, screened in the Experimenta strand at this year’s London Film Festival. Shot largely in Manila during lockdown, its soundtrack comprises a strange collage of different kinds of voices, variously mediated: on the phone, over Zoom calls, on the TV, or over public Tannoys. We hear spoken English and Tagalog, sometimes muttered or mumbled and barely audible, other times overlapping or repeated until the meaning of the language gets lost in favor of something distinctly musical. Towards the end, the words appear onscreen: “Sound was the only thing that could travel.” It makes for a powerful exploration of the emotional power of the voice, above and beyond its signifying potential.
Films like these provide a glimpse of the myriad ways a film can be musical without meekly following conventions. The whole meaning, mood, and emotional heft of Room in a Crowd and Skinamarink is intimately tied up in the way they sound and the way those sounds are arranged and composed, yet there is not a hint of trilling violins, surging minor chords or rumbling kettle drums. As films go, Skinamarink and The Zone of Interest could scarcely be more different, but they are both the work of filmmakers willing to eschew the standard toolbox used to guide and manipulate the emotions of audiences for generations—and that’s a distinction you can hear from the very first frame of the picture.