The 50 Greatest Film Scores of the 21st Century (...so far)
Film is a total artwork in which an array of disciplines, crafts and collaborators align to create a unified whole. Within that vast system, music has always been one of the most powerful binding forces. After all, even silent films relied on musical accompaniment (even if it was only to cover the noise of the projector). Think of your favourite films, chances are the score will have played a crucial role in heightening the impact it has on you. Without a memorable one, a film can be good, sure, but can it ever really be great?
Recently, we’ve seen a shift toward a desire to redraw the boundaries in cinema music: a willingness to take risks and to call on artists from the experimental margins. Artists who are world-builders in their own right – Mica Levi, Colin Stetson, Bobby Krilc, Anna Meredith, the list goes on and on. Not only do these artists mould the essence of a film as much as an auteur director, but the scores themselves have become artworks in their own right. This evolution has led to what has been described as a new golden age, and the influence of these outlier artists has been undeniable, driving a transformation in the sound of film that has rippled outward – from arthouse to multiplex.
Drawing on the expertise of a wide-ranging panel of critics, curators, creators and organisers, Crack presents a list of the greatest film scores of the 21st century so far, accompanied across the coming days and weeks by essays and interviews that interrogate and celebrate this exciting era in cinema.
A note on our selection process: to make the list as broad as possible, we limited ourselves to one film per composer and included only original or predominantly original scores.
With thanks to: Akosua T. Adasi, Ammar Kalia, Aramis Gutierrez / @anti_cgi, Arianna Caserta, Avesta Keshtmand, Chal Ravels, Claire Biddles, Daniel Dylan Wray, Steven T. Hanley / @deepermovies, Ela Bittencourt, Emma Madden, Francis Blagburn, @girlsinfilm_gif, Iana Murray, India Ysabel, Julia Bottoms, Kambole Campbell, Kate Hutchinson, Margeaux Labat / @marg.mp3, Maybelle Morgan, Nathan Evans, OffBeat Folk Film Club, Zach Schonfeld
Calm With Horses
Music: Blanck Mass
Director: Nick Rowland (2019)
No stranger to blending muscularity with poignancy, Benjamin John Power’s cues for this carefully drawn gangland drama offer unflinching insight into the protagonist’s conflicted interior world.
Eighth Grade
Music: Anna Meredith
Director: Bo Burnham (2018)
Scottish musician Anna Meredith captures the rush of emotions experienced by teenage Kayla with highly pitched electronic compositions that swing from sugary optimism to volatile overstimulation and back.
Bait
Music: Mark Jenkin
Director: Mark Jenkin (2019)
Writer and director Jenkin created these undulating analogue drones to echo the sea and amplify the uneasy relationship between Cornish locals and entitled holidaymakers.
After Yang
Music: Aska Matsumiya
Director: Kogonada (2021)
For this film probing humanity’s future, Aska Matsumiya fed her compositions – including a contribution from Ryuichi Sakamoto – into AI, yielding something futuristic yet unmistakably human.
Ex Machina
Music: Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow
Director: Alex Garland (2014)
Alex Garland’s go-to double act’s nail-finishingly tense compositions provide a dark and perfectly pitched ambient fanfare for the ascension of AI sentience.
My Father’s Shadow
Music: Duval Timothy & CJ Mirra
Director: Akinola Davies Jr. (2025)
CJ Mirra layers Duval Timothy’s pared-back instrumentation into a cacophony of sounds on sounds on sounds, twisted and altered until the sources are indiscernible.
The Childhood of a Leader
Music: Scott Walker
Director: Brady Corbet (2015)
In which 60s teeny-bopper turned avant-industrial trailblazer Scott Walker encapsulates the horror of tyrannical totalitarianism for Brady Corbet’s feature debut.
Trouble Every Day
Music: Tindersticks
Director: Claire Denis (2001)
Stuart A Staples’ chamber-pop noirists Tindersticks continued their creative partnership with Claire Denis with this elegant, brooding score to her erotic horror.
Grizzly Man
Music: Richard Thompson
Director: Werner Herzog (2005)
Richard Thompson’s tender, mournful guitar score, rich with beautiful fingerpicking and spacious melodies, perfectly mirrors the beauty – and delusion – of one man’s attempt to live among grizzlies.
Suspiria
Music: Thom Yorke
Director: Luca Guadagnino (2018)
Yorke conveys the melancholy of this Suspiria remake through sombre piano melodies and choral incantations, woven with ritualistic sound design and a pervasive sense of dread.
Fire of Love
Music: Nicolas Godin
Director: Sara Dosa (2022)
Sara Dosa’s documentary about two lovebird volcanologists gets the cosmic Lalo Schifrin treatment from Air’s Nicolas Godin in this romantic, surreal and elegiac score.
Sentimental Value
Music: Hania Rani
Director: Joachim Trier (2025)
Hania Rani’s melancholic, airy score is both delicate and evocative, gently shaping around this family drama and lending its estranged father-daughter story a subtle emotional weight.
Moon
Music: Clint Mansell
Director: Duncan Jones (2009)
Minimalist and ambient, yet unmistakably otherworldly, Clint Mansell’s piano-led score is the perfect match for this sci-fi drama about the psychological strain of life far from humanity.
Ema
Music: Nicolás Jaar
Director: Pablo Larraín (2019)
Focusing on a dancer gripped by trauma-induced self-destruction, Pablo Larraín’s unhinged character study is given expression by Jaar’s subtle detail, reggaeton touches and relentless forward momentum.
How to Have Sex
Music: Jakwob
Director: Molly Manning Walker (2023)
As the mood darkens on a teenage friends’ holiday, tenderness and carefree abandon give way to throbbing bass, claustrophobic static and the ears-ringing hum of overstimulated exhaustion.
It Follows
Music: Disasterpeace
Director: David Robert Mitchell (2014)
While chiptune artist Disasterpeace channels horror maestro John Carpenter for this smart update on the Final Girl slasher, it’s the creeping ambient passages that really get under the skin.
The Witch
Music: Mark Korven
Director: Robert Eggers (2015)
Abrasive and dread-inducing, Mark Korven’s score for this already-classic horror distils folkloric terror into eerie scrapes, nyckelharpa strings and inhuman choral passages.
Her
Music: Owen Pallett & Arcade Fire
Director: Spike Jonze (2013)
This comfort blanket of warm piano and synth lands in a strange, liminal space where, like the film itself, real life and digital realms blur into an intimate connection.
Moonlight
Music: Nicholas Britell
Director: Barry Jenkins (2016)
Groundbreaking in its fusion of orchestral themes and chopped-and-screwed techniques, Britell’s score mirrors Chiron’s evolving identity with devastating precision.
Minari
Music: Emile Mosseri
Director: Lee Isaac Chung (2020)
Soundtracking a Korean family’s relocation to 1980s Arkansas, Mosseri’s yearning piano and orchestral strings balance familial warmth with the strain of shared hardship, all filtered through a gauzy haze of childhood memory.
The Hours
Music: Philip Glass
Director: Stephen Daldry (2002)
Philip Glass’s cinematic purple patch continued unabated into the 2000s. These unmistakably Glassian themes for Stephen Daldry’s period piece infused the smallest moments with unbearable emotional depth.
Underland
Music: Hannah Peel
Director: Robert Petit (2025)
In the unknown subterranean worlds of Underland, Peel’s muffled textures, looping electronic pulses, erratic surges and eerily unfamiliar tones feel like hidden life stirring in the dark.
Irréversible
Music: Gaspar Noé
Director: Thomas Bangalter (2002)
Agitating. Corrosive. Brutal. Just plain stressful. All ways to describe Thomas Bangalter’s synapse-frying, French-touch-gone-feral accompaniment to Noé’s dark descent into reverse-time trauma.
A Field in England
Music: Jim Williams
Director: Ben Wheatley (2013)
Weird, even by Wheatley’s standards, this Civil War-set folk horror’s acid sensibility is heightened by Williams’ disquieting industrial drones, interspersed with English folk.
Drive My Car
Music: Eiko Ishibashi
Director: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi (2021)
A film as unfurling and meditative as Drive My Car – about a theatre director navigating grief, infidelity and a challenging production – required a score that would be equally deft yet emotionally poignant. However, rather than going down the route of immersive ambient soundscapes, Japanese musician Eiko Ishibashi opted for a score that is dynamic, richly orchestrated and subtly world-building. It touches upon jazz, pop and classical, with flourishes that are both experimental and accessible. Jim O’Rourke’s thoughtful guitar, bass and pedal steel brush against the intricate palette laid out by Ishibashi on piano, synths, flutes, vibraphone and electronics. It’s a rare piece of work that feels intrinsically locked into the scenes it accompanies, but also exists as a stirring standalone album.
Daniel Dylan Wray
Midsommar
Music: Bobby Krlic
Director: Ari Aster (2019)
In a bright-white inversion of the gloomy tropes of horror cinema, 2019’s Midsommar follows a group of young Americans to Sweden for a ‘traditional’ summer solstice festival. Director Ari Aster had been listening to The Haxan Cloak while writing his script, and reached out to the producer for what became an unusually close collaboration: the Yorkshire-born Bobby Krlic likened their writing sessions to the famous video of Angelo Badalamenti improvising the Twin Peaks theme for David Lynch. The resulting score mirrors everything happening on screen, from the movement of the camera to Florence Pugh’s darting eyes. Using Moogs, modular synths and a 16-player string section – plus Nordic instruments like the hurdy-gurdy and nyckelharpa (a traditional keyed chordophone) – Krlic created a modern yet analogue take on classic 70s folk horror scores like The Blood on Satan’s Claw.
Chal Ravens
Sirāt
Music: Kangding Ray
Director: Oliver Laxe (2025)
Sirāt is the Arabic word for “path” and refers to a perilous bridge, “thin as a hair, and as sharp as a sword,” that crosses over hell into paradise. It’s a fitting name for Oliver Laxe’s stressful road drama in which a father, accompanied by his young son and dog, is entangled in a multi-day desert rave as he searches for his missing daughter. Kangding Ray’s score – a fusion of industrial techno, ambient soundscapes and North African textures – sounds both like nature and machine, alien yet as old as time itself. It’s the haunting pulse that pushes anxiety levels palm-sweatingly high, reverberating long after the film’s nightmarish climax – akin to being gripped by an invisible force and pushed forward until you find yourself uncontrollably careening off the edge.
Maybelle Morgan
Spirited Away
Music: Joe Hisaishi
Director: Hayao Miyazaki (2001)
How do you encapsulate the chaotic totality of the spirit bathhouse in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away? With his (we think) 47th soundtrack, Joe Hisaishi sought to expand his glistening piano and string compositions with worldly additions such as Balinese gamelan, Middle Eastern singing, Japanese bamboo flute and buoyant hand drums. They don’t embody the characters so much as reflect protagonist Chihiro’s bewildered reaction to them – the tango of whimsical work routines with the sootballs, the overbearing gravitas and dark motives of Yubaba, and the all-hands-on-deck chaos of cleaning a Stink Spirit. Above all, Hisaishi captures the wonder of the whole adventure, unlocked by the mind-opening cluster of piano notes that opens One Summer’s Day. One of the most breathtakingly romantic pieces put to film, it’s a romance with life itself.
Nathan Evans
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
Music: Yoko Kanno
Director: Shinichirō Watanabe (2001)
Seatbelts’ score for Shinichirō Watanabe’s sci-fi western series Cowboy Bebop is perhaps best remembered for its exciting, freewheeling jazz, exemplified by the opening theme Tank!. In Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, the band and its composer Yoko Kanno expanded their palette. The conwoman Faye Valentine nods along to Cosmic Dare (Pretty With a Pistol), a striking slice of Y2K pop, while Hamduche and the Moroccan-inspired folk song Musawe (both with vocals in Arabic) bring the narrative to life, serving as uncanny glimmers of the old world, surviving devastation and persevering on new planets. Though these different sounds add up to a fascinating mosaic, this doesn’t mean Kanno and Seatbelts abandon their more familiar sounds: What Planet Is This?! – its call-and-response sax and vocals playing over an exhilarating aerial dogfight – is an easy highlight.
Kambole Campbell
Mandy
Music: Jóhann Jóhannsson
Director: Panos Cosmatos (2018)
There are more commercial Jóhann Jóhannsson scores worthy of inclusion here (Prisoners, Arrival, Sicario) but the lesser-known Mandy – a tense, vivid, hallucinatory film featuring Nicolas Cage as a lumberjack seeking vengeance against a cult leader – is also one of his finest. With this film coming soon after Jóhannsson was dropped from scoring Blade Runner 2049, there is a feeling of him being unburdened and unleashed from the pressures of major film studios at this point. So he lets rip with a dark, menacing, heavy score. Stephen O’Malley from drone lords sunn O))) lays down crackling, ominous guitar, while analogue synths build up moody layers. It all coalesces into an often nightmarish concoction of sounds. Jóhannsson sadly died before the film’s release and never saw Mandy’s immediate entry into the cult classic canon.
Daniel Dylan Wray
Drive
Music: Cliff Martinez
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn (2011)
Kavinsky, Desire, College, Chromatics and Riz Ortolani all have the honour of soundtracking some of Drive’s most iconic moments, but holding it all together is Cliff Martinez’s brooding synth score. Given just a five-week turnaround, the final piece of the film’s production puzzle was made doubly crucial by how starved of dialogue Drive is, preferring to revel in the mystique of its nameless getaway driver protagonist. Martinez – an erstwhile drummer for Lydia Lunch and the Red Hot Chili Peppers – fills in the blanks with wine-glass drones, ticking heartbeats and a sparing use of arpeggios, while Skull Crushing adds clandestine horror to the film’s most affecting act of violence with creeping strings and heavy hisses. Capturing the synthwave aesthetic and turning it into a pop culture phenomenon, Drive’s neo-noir twist on 80s neon pastiche set the tone for everything to come, from Stranger Things to Uncut Gems.
Nathan Evans
The Social Network
Music: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
Director: David Fincher (2010)
Every rewatch of David Fincher’s The Social Network offers up some new detail that you never considered before. The score, composed by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, collaborators in Nine Inch Nails since 2005, is very much the same. The Oscar-winning score, which jumps off from NIN’s experimental ambient-industrial album Ghosts I-IV, is haunting and propulsive, and at times even vulnerable. One surprise is the duo’s cover of Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, which accompanies a nail-biting regatta midway through the film. Whereas the original is a whimsical piece, evoking fairytales, Ross and Reznor’s is ghostly and metallic, immersing you in the cutting world of power and ambition that Fincher constructs. The score’s futuristic, post-industrial tone transforms the familiar into something surreal, as if anticipating the uncanny valley produced by Zuckerberg and social media. It’s no wonder that Ross and Reznor are now one of Hollywood’s most sought-after composer duos.
Akosua T. Adasi
Phantom Thread
Music: Jonny Greenwood
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson (2017)
Ever since their first collaboration for 2007’s There Will Be Blood, Jonny Greenwood has been the go-to composer for Paul Thomas Anderson – a fruitful partnership unbound by genre. Phantom Thread is their mutual crowning achievement, as Greenwood translates the creative genius and fastidious precision of Daniel Day-Lewis’ fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock into luscious compositions performed by a 60-piece orchestra. In the film’s titular motifs, piercing strings and muted piano give the foreboding suggestion of the spectre that haunts Woodcock. And its highlights – House of Woodcock and For the Hungry Boy – heighten the seductive, twisted romance at the centre of Phantom Thread, where sumptuous chords dance alongside an operatic string section. There’s a darkness that lies beneath, but the effect is intoxicating all the same.
Iana Murray
Old Joy
Music: Yo La Tengo
Director: Kelly Reichardt (2006)
Kelly Reichardt’s road movie Old Joy follows two out-of-touch college friends – one a perma-stoned free spirit with a penchant for mysticism played by Will Oldham, the other leaning into domestication with his wife and dog – drifting apart during one of their increasingly infrequent camping trips in Oregon’s Cascades. Capturing their worn-out friendship and creeping isolation from each other is a pitch-perfect score from Yo La Tengo and session guitarist Smokey Hormel, improvised in a single afternoon. Just as the friends’ trip goes nowhere very fast, so too this serene, melancholy score resists propulsion: a minimalist, meandering forerunner of what would eventually be called ambient Americana. Ira Kaplan and Hormel’s bone-weary twang and sliding reverbed guitars become a meditation on big skies, deep forests and things being quietly lost in the campfire.
Chris Parkin
Joker
Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir
Director: Todd Phillips (2019)
Icelandic composer and musician Hildur Guðnadóttir won the 2020 Oscar for Best Original Score for her work on Joker, becoming the first woman to do so in 20 years, as well as a Golden Globe, making her the first-ever female solo winner in the same category. A sign of the times indeed. Guðnadóttir’s score puts the goth in Gotham – a cinematic masterclass in creeping dread and inky-black atmosphere that rises ominously like steam from the city’s sewers. Cellos are used to unsettling effect, but notably Guðnadóttir picked out a distinctive variant to mirror the Joker’s interior world: the dórófónn. Made in Iceland (and also known as a halldorophone), it’s an electrified take on a cello that gives the strings a sad, drone-like quality. You can hear it at full mournful on the score’s signature piece, Bathroom Dance, as the Joker begins to embrace his murderous persona.
Kate Hutchinson
Dancer in the Dark
Music: Björk
Director: Lars von Trier (2000)
Björk played the lead role of factory worker Selma in Lars von Trier’s utterly bleak musical, though the musician famously found its filming so traumatic that she was almost put off acting for life. There’s a sense of reclamation with the film’s score, which she later adapted and retitled Selmasongs – an industrial-orchestral marvel, like a Disney version of Test Dept, with songs constructed from a bricolage of clanking metallic objects, bouncing balls and chugging trains. Cvalda brings new meaning to the word ‘banger’, with Björk’s onomatopoeic lyrics turning the factory line into a fantasia. She was nominated for an Oscar, meanwhile, for I’ve Seen It All, which replaced Peter Stormare with Thom Yorke. She won the red carpet with her iconic swan dress, though lost the Best Original Song award to Bob Dylan.
Kate Hutchinson
Amélie
Music: Yann Tiersen
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet (2001)
A moment of cinematic divine intervention: the introduction of multi-instrumentalist Yann Tiersen’s music to director Jean-Pierre Jeunet through a CD playing in the car of an Amélie production designer, and Jeunet’s discovery of a replacement for the intended composer Michael Nyman. Even 25 years after the film’s release, the sweet, Breton-inspired sounds of La Valse d’Amélie – a lilting waltz of accordion and harpsichord – conjure such a vivid memory of Audrey Tautou’s endearing smile and the crack of a metal spoon breaking the caramelised top of a crème brûlée. Tiersen’s thoughtful, sonically emotive composition so beautifully evokes the illusion of a whimsical day in Paris that even if you’ve never stepped foot there, you know exactly what an ideal day in the city would feel like. Many of the compositions on the soundtrack were originally written for Tiersen’s first three albums, which is almost hard to believe, and yet further solidifies that Tiersen and Amélie were always meant to be.
India Ysabel
Mysterious Skin
Music: Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie
Director: Gregg Araki (2004)
New Queer Cinema auteur Gregg Araki is known for his killer movie soundtracks packed with shoegaze and dreampop legends, a way for him to put his love for bands like Slowdive and the Jesus and Mary Chain on full display. So it made sense that he sought out Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie and minimalist pioneer Harold Budd to collaborate on the score for Mysterious Skin, a disturbing coming-of-age tale of child abuse and sexual assault in middle America. Having previously worked together on Cocteau Twins’ The Moon and the Melodies, the two crafted a muted palette of resonant ambient dreamscapes, complete with reverb-drenched slide guitar and ominous, suspended piano. It both accompanies the ephemeral glimpses of beauty in the story – a gentle snowfall, a reassuring glance, a parting goodbye – and pacifies the audience during the film’s most traumatic scenes of anticipation, confusion and discovery.
Margeaux Labat (@marg.mp3)
Embrace of the Serpent
Music: Nascuy Linares
Director: Ciro Guerra (2015)
Nascuy Linares’ haunting score is the one unnatural aesthetic element in a film that ventures into the depths of the Amazon jungle. Shot in black and white – a bold choice that strips the rainforest of its vivid, technicolour richness – the film places an unusual burden on Linares’ score to fill the sensory void. The Venezuelan composer rises to the challenge by masterfully creating a rich tapestry of sonic movement that initially sounds like field recordings of entranced tribespeople chanting, but is soon enveloped by contemporary instruments, including eerie horns, a plucked guitar, and an ominous drone that pulses and echoes discordantly. It’s a quietly unsettling transition, where the unnatural world seeps into the natural, lending the film a hypnotic quality that leaves you feeling disconnected from reality.
Charlie Mark
Bugonia
Music: Jerskin Fendrix
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos (2025)
Bees. Basement. Spaceship. These were the three words English composer Jerskin Fendrix had to work with as prompts when composing the score for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia. While some would have floundered under such unorthodox instructions, Fendrix instead created one of the most compelling, chaotic and memorable scores of the 2020s. Intentionally or unintentionally, Lanthimos’ elusive methods enabled Fendrix to tap into the crazed and paranoid state of mind that grips Bugonia’s protagonist throughout the film. From the buzzing and deceivingly peaceful sounds of the opening track, Bees, to the overbearing and frankly anxiety-inducing tempest that is Grand Tango, the score commands your attention and makes the experience of every scene feel elevated to something disorientingly immersive. It is Lanthimos’ trust in Fendrix’s musical intuition that has given the score such a lasting imprint.
India Ysabel
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Music: Alex G
Director: Jane Schoenbrun (2021)
This score marked the first collaboration between Alex G and director Jane Schoenbrun, whose third project together is set to premiere at Cannes in May. In Schoenbrun’s debut feature, a teenager begins to question her identity as her image starts to dematerialise, creating a play of reflections between her real self and the one captured through her webcam during an online challenge tied to a creepypasta. It’s not hard to see why the worlds of Schoenbrun’s films – rooted in suburban pre-teen memory and the search for identity that defines that stage of life – align so well with the semantic universe of the Philadelphia-based musician. Intimate yet haunting, the songs shift between disorienting ambient passages and tracks of just guitar and voice, blending an innocent atmosphere with a touch of internet-glitched magic.
Arianna Caserta
Berberian Sound Studio
Music: Broadcast
Director: Peter Strickland (2012)
Given Broadcast’s obsessive, insular approach to transporting listeners through woozy, synth-pop soundscapes of feeling and mood, it’s a surprise Trish Keenan and James Cargill didn’t compose more film scores. But this one, for Peter Strickland’s film about a hobbyist Foley engineer who is mysteriously invited to Italy to work on an occult giallo movie, is a masterclass in otherworldliness. Keenan and Cargill score Gilderoy’s descent into mind-unravelling paranoia with a spectral collage drawing on Fabio Frizzi, Krzysztof Komeda, Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape and the hauntological sound they mastered on their 2009 collaboration with The Focus Group, … Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, blurring their hallucinatory, Joe Meek-ish modulations with fragments of dialogue and blood-curdling screams, as if finding ghosts trapped in analogue machines.
Chris Parkin
The Brutalist
Music: Daniel Blumberg
Director: Brady Corbet (2024)
In Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic about the insidious nature of the American Dream, Hungarian architect László Tóth (played by Adrien Brody) holds ambitions that know no limits. The film’s sweeping score, composed by Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg, similarly contains the full scope of Tóth’s high-flying dreams. It begins with a three-part overture that signals his arrival at Ellis Island with a regal brass section and ominous rhythms. Blumberg’s prepared piano, altered with screws fitted into the strings, turns the instrument into the score’s percussive heart and renders the sound of construction into its own source of music. Singular collaborations with pianist John Tilbury and Erasure’s synth-pop pioneer Vince Clarke (for the intermission and final cues, respectively) are just extra touches to the composer’s monumental project.
Iana Murray
Candyman
Music: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Director: Nia DaCosta (2021)
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe had large shoes to fill when it came to composing the score for director Nia DaCosta’s 2021 remake of the 1992 gothic horror Candyman. In the original film, minimalist composer Philip Glass wrote eerie choral and organ music to accompany the gory African American folk tale, using the voice almost as a warning response to the on-screen action. Lowe’s score bravely does away with that interpretation and instead delves far deeper and darker through ominous drones, whispers of electronically processed voice and snatches of jarring found sounds. Full of creeping atonal motifs, like the metallic grinding on Joke Summoning or the wooden creaking of Row Houses, Lowe’s score revels in the space between its notes, conjuring terrifying imagined scenes in the silence before new noise arrives.
Ammar Kalia
Aftersun
Music: Oliver Coates
Director: Charlotte Wells (2022)
Director Charlotte Wells posed a question for Oliver Coates as he set about creating the score for Aftersun: how could music convey to the audience that this film is all memory? He meets it with a suite of minimal, heat-sick ambient pieces that frame the images on screen – images that are sometimes themselves images of images: first-gen digital camcorder videos on fast-forward, blocky and fragmented, all haloed with an unspeakable sadness. These are the recollections of a present-day Sophie, recalling from a vantage point of adulthood, and perhaps grief, a holiday in Turkey with her troubled father. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Coates has said that, aside from memory, music in Aftersun might also stand for the ocean: certainly, his spare, yearning, at times dissonant cello embodies that tow from somewhere chasm-deep, always there below the surface, drawing you back.
Louise Brailey
Hereditary
Music: Colin Stetson
Director: Ari Aster (2018)
When he tapped Colin Stetson to score his harrowing feature debut, in which a grieving family is terrorised by mysterious supernatural forces, horror visionary Ari Aster encouraged the experimental saxophonist-composer to make the music feel “evil”. Stetson delivered in spades, harnessing his clarinets and manipulated brass instruments to craft a score that simmers with menace, unfurling from low, creaking soundscapes to curdled, siren-like paroxysms and, finally, a twisted fanfare during the film’s literally demonic climax. “I was trying to establish something that didn’t use familiar conventions,” Stetson explained at the time. “So it would create tension and mounting dread, but would do it in ways that felt of a different world.” At times, his chilling music seems to be possessed by the same unseen demonic force that’s loose within the Graham family’s bucolic home.
Zach Schonfeld
Uncut Gems
Music: Daniel Lopatin
Directors: Josh & Benny Safdie (2019)
Building on his highly strung work for the Safdie brothers’ previous film Good Time, Daniel Lopatin’s cortisol-spiking score for Uncut Gems is as tense and propulsive as it is opalescent and beautiful. There’s a hint of Vangelis and Tangerine Dream, and even a cue that could have jumped straight from the score for Akira. Crucially, this isn’t mere pastiche or window dressing: the music is tightly bound to the psychology of Howie Ratner, whose increasingly dangerous gambling is a symptom of constant dissatisfaction and capitalist hunger. The key lies in a palette that blurs the line between tactile, organic textures and synthetic, almost cosmic atmospheres. In other words, classic OPN, dialled right up to 11.
Kambole Campbell
Mulholland Drive
Music: Angelo Badalamenti
Director: David Lynch (2001)
The first time I saw Mulholland Drive in a cinema, the crowd laughed as Naomi Watts repeated “I’m in love with you” during a sex scene with a woman she’d just met. At that moment, the score by David Lynch’s longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, which had rumbled with dread up to this point, broke into something like heaven, the notes aligning in a soaring, overwhelming harmony. The laughter felt like a reflex, the way we laugh in a haunted house to protect ourselves from fear. Here, it was a response to beauty too intense to hold. As always, in Mulholland Drive, Lynch and Badalamenti treat feelings at face value, inflating them to a breaking point. Moving between terror and ecstasy, the score trades leitmotif for sustained tones of dread and brief rapture.
Emma Madden
Under the Skin
Music: Mica Levi
Director: Jonathan Glazer (2013)
With a couple of victims under her belt, Scarlett Johansson’s pouty succubus goes for a walk through Glasgow city centre. It teems with life: old and young, fat and skinny, decently off and skint. The shots begin to overlap, individual faces melting away as the score swells into an intense, upsetting buzz. This, we realise, is how Johansson’s man-trapping alien sees us: as noisy, incoherent prey.
Mica Levi’s score for Jonathan Glazer’s third film – a mysterious, largely wordless adaptation of Michel Faber’s sci-fi novel – is always trying to tell us something. Seemingly minimalist, and mainly revolving around a recurring three-note motif and sinister clouds of atonality, it’s a score that rewards close inspection, with complex ideas embedded in the tiniest gestures.
Glazer made his name in the 90s with a run of acclaimed music videos and commercials, including Radiohead’s Karma Police and the famous Guinness ‘Surfer’ ad soundtracked by Leftfield. With Under the Skin, he once again let the music lead his storytelling rather than the other way around, ultimately piecing together his final cut around Levi’s score.
The collaboration emerged after Glazer was introduced to Chopped & Screwed, Levi’s 2011 orchestral homage to Houston hip-hop. Still in their mid-twenties, and then fronting the shambling art-punk trio Micachu & the Shapes, Levi would later say that Glazer must have been looking for a “novice” – but what he got was one of the most imaginative and exacting composers of their generation.
“The idea was to follow Scarlett Johansson’s character and try to react in real time to what she was experiencing,” Levi said of Glazer’s hands-off direction. “If your lifeforce is being distilled by an alien, it’s not necessarily going to sound very nice. It’s supposed to be physical, alarming, hot.”
Building on the techniques of Chopped & Screwed, Levi returned to the orchestra – particularly the “airy, leaky” viola – and applied subtle changes to lo-fi recordings of strings, flute and percussion, slowing the tape down or tweaking the pitch. Their bending, bowing tones feel chronically unsettled; as organic yet unfamiliar as Johansson’s insectoid femme fatale.
“A lot of the sound is a mixture of bad recording technique, on my part, and not fine playing,” Levi explained. “A viola is not solid, the sound it produces is like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.” The scraped strings produce not one note but a whole range of alien harmonics, echoing the spooky sound of early analogue synths. Drawing on the 20th-century avant-garde (particularly Iannis Xenakis’ abrasive Tetras for string quartet), Levi’s score leans hard into atonality – but it’s tactile, not just cerebral. There’s a frantic buzzing that suggests an alien hivemind, an extended cymbal roll that, according to Levi, represents the cosmos and nature, and the cacophonous terror of Meat to Maths, which could just as easily soundtrack some bleak, Herzogian wildlife documentary.
There has to be a moment of relief, but it doesn’t last long – first, as the alien understands that she is living in Johansson’s body (great news!), then as she tries to bridge the species gap in bed with her love interest. The film’s only major triad appears, a ‘human’ chord reaching out to us – but it’s wrong somehow, almost repulsive, and the promise of connection is short-circuited.
Snubbed by the Oscars – a glaring example of the Academy getting it spectacularly wrong – Levi’s score has nonetheless cemented itself as perhaps the most impactful film music of the last 20 years. This “novice” interloper immediately took their place alongside contemporary greats like Jonny Greenwood, while Under the Skin energised a renaissance in scoring, opening the door for a new school of composers eager to channel their high-low influences and rule-breaking techniques into visceral, seductive, altogether alien soundworlds.
Chal Ravens
Photography: Under the Skin: Studio Canal / A24, Mulholland Drive: Universal Pictures / BAC Distribution, Uncut Gems: A24 / Netflix, Hereditary: A24, Aftersun: Mubi / A24, Candyman: TriStar Pictures, The Brutalist: A24 / Universal Pictures / Focus Features, Berberian Sound Studio: Artificial Eye, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair: Utopia. Bugonia: Focus Features, Embrace of the Serpent: Diaphana Films, Mysterious Skin: Tartan Films / TLA Releasing / 1More Film, Amélie: UGC Fox Distribution / Prokino Filmverleih, Dancer in the Dark: Angel Films / Les Films du Losange / Constantin Film / Istituto Luce / Sandrew Metronome / FilmFour Distributors / Fine Line Features, Joker: Warner Bros. Pictures Old Joy: Kino International, Phantom Thread: Focus Features, The Social Network: Sony Pictures Releasing, Drive: FilmDistrict, Mandy: RLJE Films, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie: Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan, Spirited Away: Toho, Sirāt: BTeam Pictures, Midsommar: A24 / Nordisk Film, Drive My Car: Bitters End, A Field in England: Picturehouse Entertainment, Irréversible: Mars Distribution, Underland: Dogwoof The Hours: Paramount Pictures, Minari: A24, Moonlight: A24, Her: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Witch: A24 / Universal Pictures, It Follows: RADiUS-TWC, How to Have Sex: Mubi, Ema: Mubi, Moon: Sony Pictures Classics, Sentimental Value: Mubi / Nordisk Film, Fire of Love: National Geographic Documentary Films / Neon, Suspiria: Amazon Studios. Rye Lane: Searchlight Pictures, Grizzly Man: Lionsgate Films, Trouble Every Day: Rézo Films, The Childhood of a Leader: IFC Films, My Father’s Shadow: Mubi, Ex Machina: A24 / Universal Pictures, After Yang: A24 / Showtime, Bait: BFI Films, Eighth Grade: A24, Calm With Horses: Altitude Film Distribution. Used under fair use for editorial purposes.