Broad Sound

At their best, film scores approach a kind of magic, an alchemy by which both image and music are transformed. The soundtracks for Star Wars and Blade Runner and The Third Man seem to embody the innermost substance of the films for which they were composed. But most partnerships between a director and a composer are transient: composers need other projects to work on; directors want the right voice for each film. Few collaborators become as indelibly associated as John Williams and Steven Spielberg, or Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone.

It seemed for a while that Denis Villeneuve and Jóhann Jóhannsson might be on such a trajectory. The three films they completed together were among the most exciting that Hollywood produced in the 2010s, and heralded the arrival of an obvious filmmaking master, an oeuvre that would last. Jóhannsson was instrumental to this feeling. I remember walking out of the cinema after Sicario and Arrival in a kind of daze, still gripped by the music. Selfishly, I felt it was part of the calamity of Jóhannsson’s early death that he would never score another Villeneuve film.

30 years ago, when he started making music, orchestral scores still dominated Hollywood; today, they make up a shrinking minority. Jóhannsson’s work exemplifies several tendencies in contemporary film sound—the digital manipulation and distortion of orchestral recordings, sound-specific motifs rather than pitch-based themes, a blurring of the boundary between music and sound design—in part because he helped define it.

Even before they met, there was a tonal affinity between Jóhannsson’s music and Villeneuve’s films, a corresponding slowness and desolation. This may have been why Villeneuve picked Jóhannsson’s CD from a slush pile over several A-listers, and why the music fit his films as neatly as a glove. In their collaborations, you can sense Jóhannsson unfurling his wings, expanding in range, and finding new ideas, many of which have now entered the film-music lexicon. He was a film composer’s composer; unusually uncompromising, and with one foot in an avant-garde tradition, he continued producing thoughtful solo work even as his film career was taking off.

Villeneuve, for his part, has always prioritized film’s sensory dimensions. The beauty of cinema, he has said, depends not on plot or dialogue but rather poetic moments created by “choreograph[ing] a dance between sound and images.” This vision, I think, is what makes him so adept at the laboratory work of aesthetic experimentation, and why his films’ weaknesses tend to be structural, baked in by the time work begins. It may be the tragedy of Villeneuve’s filmmaking that he is master of all of cinema’s arts except story, which is the most important.

Still, I can’t think of another director with an eye as good as his, nor one whose every American-made film has been nominated for the Best Cinematography Oscar—five so far, and counting. His ear is just as strong; few other oeuvres sound as consistently individual. He has said that music is too powerful to listen to while writing, and approaches sound with something close to reverence. Contrary to usual industry practice, he begins not only scoring but also sound design long before production, making room for exploration and ensuring that sound is part of the way his films are conceived.

Music has become so central to the elegiac dimension of his films that his earliest features (1998’s August 32nd on Earth and 2000’s Maelström) can seem like the work of another director. Postmodern, lathered in irony, they used upbeat songs contrapuntally, to subvert and satirize. Despite their warm reception, Villeneuve was dissatisfied, and took a nine-year hiatus. When he returned to filmmaking with Polytechnique (2009) and Incendies (2010), the essentials of his mature style—sedate pacing, somber tone—were in place. His cinema, which had begun as farce, continued in tragedy.

Polytechnique is about the 1989 anti-feminist mass shooting in Montréal, Incendies a restaging of the Oedipus myth in modern-day Lebanon. Both films were budgeted at around $6 million, and were equally well-reviewed; both look upon atrocity with patient, understated horror. But Incendies wrapped its moral core in a detective story that keeps the audience anticipating revelations, and its box-office haul of $16 million dwarfed Polytechnique’s $1.4 million. This striking divergence helps explain the future direction of Villeneuve’s filmmaking.

Prisoners (2013)

He pushed deeper into genre territory with the film that marked both his and Jóhannsson’s Hollywood debuts. In Prisoners, two young girls are kidnapped by a woman whose own son’s death years earlier ignited her vengeful spree of child murders and abductions. With its mazes and snakes and elaborate coincidences, it may be the hokiest script Villeneuve has shot. He lent the film gravitas by grounding his interpretation in tragedy, and by focusing less on the sinister kidnapper than on the moral dilemmas of the kidnapped girls’ parents.

He also selected a little-known literature graduate to compose the film’s music. In a 2020 interview with Deadline, Villeneuve said he heard a “solemn melancholia” in Jóhannsson’s earlier music, and “one profound question: why does God not answer any of our phone calls?” Unusually for a thriller, Jóhannsson’s bleak score is free of percussion, and never contributes to the conventional fast-paced tension or suspense. Rather, his slow, careful sweeps of sound build eventually to a terrible mournfulness—in strikingly raw and sincere confrontation, we may feel, with the parents’ anguish for their abducted daughters.

But this reading of the score is destabilized when one of the parents kidnaps and begins to torture a man (Paul Dano) who has an intellectual disability, and who may or may not know anything about the girls’ disappearance. Slowly, as his face turns to bloody pulp, the score becomes a lament for the darkness in the heart of man, and for the evil we do in the name of good.

Roger Deakins, who had seen Incendies and was keen to work with its young director, admitted in a 2023 American Cinematographer interview that he initially thought the “Gothic elements” in the script went “too far.” He was reassured by Villeneuve’s vision, which located the core of the story in the torture of an innocent—a “timely” theme in the wake of revelations about the CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogation.” Villeneuve himself explicitly linked the film’s critique of a family-loving, righteous masculinity to America’s post-9/11 adventurism.

Polytechnique and Incendies both featured a kind of almost-music, mainly plucked strings and piano chords, yielding a gently lyrical melancholy. The instruments were recognizable and the restraint ultimately a little evasive. By comparison, Prisoners seems assured; the first fully-fledged score in Villeneuve’s cinema, it’s also clearly a contemporary one, made up of sounds that have a distinctive identity in themselves.

It steers away from many conventions around melancholy film music, especially the vibrato-heavy melodies that occasionally reach heights of piercing beauty, as in Schindler’s List. Instead, Jóhannson’s strings are glacially cold, seamlessly blended with digital synths and omnipresent, fluctuating drones as well as two exotic, glassy instruments, the ondes Martenot and Cristal Baschet, which contribute a church organ-like, funereal quality. “Jóhann was constantly searching for new sounds,” one of his collaborators, Colin Stetson, remembered in Little White Lies:

Everything was about discovering a new way of composing. I remember working with him in a Berlin studio for 16 hours straight and he was absolutely ravenous when it came to creating sounds that stirred up something visceral. But it was always about sewing those sounds into the picture in a way that was subtle.

The characteristically stop-start movement of the Prisoners score—a slow sweep of sound, then silence, then another slow sweep—hints at a music on the threshold of non-existence, and shares something with Max Richter’s deconstructions of classical music, a reducing of compositional elements to their emotive cores. Both have been called “post-classical” composers, alongside artists like Ólafir Arnalds, Hauschka, and Nils Frahm, all of whom are influenced by orchestral minimalism.

The distinctive texture of Jóhannsson’s scores comes in part from the fact that he never uses conventional digitally-generated sounds, which can sound flat, thin, or unnaturally clear-edged. (Compare Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s scores for Challengers and The Social Network.) Even his drones are constructed from manipulated recordings of real instruments, and his digital effects, such as reverb, fluctuate in intensity, helping achieve his ambition of making it hard to tell “where the orchestra starts and the electronic sound ends.”

The result is a film that punches above its weight class in artistry and sophistication. It also grossed more than $120 million on a production budget of $46 million, proving that the compact at the heart of Villeneuve’s cinema—meticulousness, sincerity, and tragedy fused with genre—could work with wider audiences. He has adhered to it ever since.

Sicario (2015)

His second collaboration with Jóhannsson, another take on the themes of American hypocrisy and use of torture, chillingly captures the horrors of drug cartel violence. In Sicario’s opening sequence, an FBI team raids a safehouse in which the walls are packed with decaying, shrink-wrapped corpses. Later, we will see naked bodies hung from a bridge like meat in a butcher’s shop.

Sicario, too, was expertly shot by Deakins, and shares some DNA with his earlier work on No Country For Old Men: both are films straddling the US-Mexican border, set in the hinterland of the cartels and infused with concern for the drug war’s collateral damage. Both are built around a character out of their depth, and feature an antagonist of special menace. In Sicario, the lead is Kate Macy (Emily Blunt), an FBI agent seconded to a task force with abstruse aims, and her foil Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), a sometime lawyer and the assassin (“sicario”) of the title.

Jóhannsson’s score for the film, which garnered his second consecutive Oscar nomination (after The Theory of Everything), uses pounding drums, a large brass section, and gravelly contrabasses to concentrate sound in the low end of the register. Perhaps its most memorable motif is a thick, descending string glissando, featured prominently on “The Beast,” which evokes a dismaying sinking feeling. Later, some of Jóhannsson’s compositions for the 2016 LP Orphée, reused on Garth Davis’s Mary Magdalene (2018), seem to ascend heavenwards; here we’re being dragged into hell. The feeling of events totally outside our control is reinforced by the intensely clipped, crashing drums, which build very gradually with the glissando to suggest a dystopian war party’s approach—though it’s hard to imagine any human using drums so close to white noise. Part of what they signal is precisely the inhuman, the permeating presence of an amoral force beyond all conceptions of evil or good.

These and other elements in the score recur, but none constitute a theme in the traditional sense. There’s no character or location to attach their meaning to, and they are not melodic patterns readily transposed to other instruments or keys; instead, as is increasingly true in contemporary films, their meaning is bound up in their specific sounds. They function less to tell a story than to create a world, to set an emotional foundation of intensifying menace and brutality relieved only in one or two places by a countervailing, tragic lyricism.

This latter tendency first appears in “Desert Music” with Hildur Guðnadóttir’s cello and is picked up by a six-string bass in “Melancholia,” and seems to represent something like mourning for the human cost of border violence. Villeneuve’s characteristic melancholy is at its lowest ebb for a post-2010 film here, though arguably also its most powerful because, like Polytechnique and Incendies, it confronts genuine, real-life horror.

The score’s two hues meet in Sicario’s final scene, in which a woman, widowed by Alejandro on his way to execute a cartel boss, watches her son play soccer. The track begins with a restrained variation on the cello melody from “Desert Music,” transposed to ethereal hums, but shades into the terrifying glissando and thrashing drums from “The Beast”—a moment of sorrowful reflection drowned, in other words, in the blood and horror to come. The delayed title card which finally appears here confirms that this boy, too, is a potential future “sicario.”

Like No Country, Sicario is unusually sparing with its score. Later in Villeneuve’s cinema, music plays a much more overt emotion-making role, and is sometimes in tension with the imagery onscreen; here, it’s supportive and synchronous. The menace and confusion comes from the story itself, and in particular Kate’s position as an outsider, neither prepared for nor fully understanding what’s underway.

The score is typically sparse, and carefully blended with sound design to achieve Jóhannsson’s ambition of making music “an integrated part of the whole sound fixture,” as he put it in a 2018 Deadline interview. But it also reflects a broader tendency in modern, partly-digital scores. YouTuber Charles Cornell articulated this as the difference between a score that brilliantly commentates the action, like John Williams’s for Star Wars or Howard Shore’s for The Lord of the Rings, versus music that seems to emanate from the film’s world itself, like Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack to Dune.

In reality, the difference must be one of degree rather than kind: film music still consists of clearly non-diegetic sounds. But fewer of them are produced by recognizable instruments, so many sounds stick out less, are less easily categorized by our minds—and they point not towards an orchestra hall, but rather the world their timbres are carefully chosen to evoke.

Jóhannsson’s score here creates one of brutal violence and hair-raising anxiety, embodying another tendency in recent scores. Film music has variously been theorized as a drug (Adorno and Eisler), a pacifier (Claudia Gorbman), or a source of “perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect and unintegrated world” (Caryl Flinn). Looked at in relation to contemporary film music, which is far more likely to be abrasive or unpleasant, these feel less like reactions to the medium than to a particular, Romantic style.

Arrival (2016)

Villeneuve and Jóhannsson’s final film together, Arrival, tells the story of a linguistics professor enlisted to communicate with recently-landed extraterrestrials. By learning the aliens’ language, Louise Banks (Amy Adams) begins to perceive time in the circular way they do, and so comes to “remember” the future—a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that languages rewire our brains in unique ways.

Jóhannsson’s work on Arrival “marks a career high,” in the words of Variety critic Peter Debruge, “delivering a totally unprecedented, unexpectedly unique musical fingerprint to a film Villeneuve deliberately wanted to distinguish from science-fiction thrillers that had come before.” He was widely thought to have been robbed of an Oscar due to the prominent use of a Max Richter track, “On the Nature of Daylight,” which rendered his score ineligible, and may have contributed to the subsequent adjustment to the Academy’s rules.

The central tensions in Arrival are born from competing judgments of the aliens’ hostility, which are reflected in the score’s dialectic of wonder and fear. Both are imbued with a strangeness that is new to Jóhannsson’s music and draws importantly on the 20th-century experimental tradition, whose sometimes rebarbative oddity proved well-suited to a story about ambiguous first encounters.

At the menacing end are heavy drones made from attackless piano recordings, whose tidal swellings in and out provide a foundation of sound, as well as chain-like, metallic clangs. There are also deep throat-singing hums with a somehow transcendental quality, picked up in all three subsequent Villeneuve scores (and sounding quite different from the more familiar Mongolian throat singing that Zimmer uses for the Sardaukar in Dune).

Elsewhere, mallets striking wooden planks yield elemental percussive sounds, like a Steve Reich song foregrounding its construction. Invented phrases like “nan nan nanana” and “wata-na, watana-ta” seem to hover at the edge of comprehensibility, giving the impression of a babbling child learning to speak, or a language in the process of its creation. High choral voices, like circling clouds of sound, mirror the circularity of the aliens’ language, suggesting demigods or angels beyond our comprehension, with more than a hint of Blakean darkness about them.

Probably the score’s most striking elements are the seal-like, eerie, didgeridoo yowls produced by overtone singing. This technique involves manipulating the vocal tract’s resonance to emphasize particular overtones, present in almost all musical sounds, and features prominently in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Stimmung: Model 11.” It is also practiced traditionally by several Indigenous peoples, and its otherworldly quality is reflected in the shamanistic, spiritual meanings it has for them.

In Arrival, these arrestingly strange squeals appear during our first sighting of the alien spaceships, and clearly indicate a non-human intelligence, but they bear no resemblance to the actual sounds made by the extraterrestrials—called heptapods—in the film. The linkage is thematic rather than direct. In this regard, the score simultaneously embodies a quality of subtlety and closeness, in being more closely woven into the texture of the film than the prior generation of orchestral scores—and, on the other hand, of strangeness and distance, in representing Jóhannsson’s artistically distinct take on the film’s core themes.

“Music needs to be something different,” Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos said when asked why the soundtrack to Poor Things was written almost entirely before production had started: “It needs to add a layer, even if it’s contradicting—to enhance it in a way that’s not really expected.” The more common approach is of “writing to picture”—i.e., while watching an already prepared cut of the film—which can yield scores exquisitely tuned to shifts within a scene, but also often means hewing closely to what has been shot.

Like Poor Things, most of the music for Arrival preceded the film’s production. The sui generis score owes much to Villeneuve’s decision to start the composing process so early, and to give the Icelandic composer what he called “carte blanche to experiment.” All told, he spent most of a year writing—an almost unheard-of span of time, given that many A-list composers (with the help of large teams) churn out five or six soundtracks annually.

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For a certain kind of cinephile, Jóhannsson’s firing from Blade Runner 2049 came as a traumatic shock. It cannot have been an easy decision for Villeneuve, whether or not studio pressure was involved. I imagine him agonizing over the benefits of securing a sound closer to Vangelis’s original, which Jóhannsson was not interested in producing, against the risk that his replacement, Benjamin Wallfisch (a former Zimmer assistant made good), might drum to a more familiar beat.

In retrospect, the 2010s look like a sweet spot in Villeneuve’s career. His early features were, like anyone else’s, negotiations with straightened circumstances, while his recent blockbusters have been differently hobbled by the need to appeal to wide audiences. Conventions he had so carefully resisted—pro forma love plots, cut-out villains, dead extras—finally found their way into his work. In the middle period, the two directions in Villeneuve’s cinema existed in a delicate balance.

Blade Runner 2049 now looks increasingly like the pivot film by which Jóhannsson was, improbably, replaced by Hans Zimmer. The German was an adviser on that film, and later turned down Christopher Nolan’s Tenet to score Dune. It would not be fair to say that these scores are uninteresting, or not well-suited to Villeneuve’s films, but they do lack the dignified directness and bombast-free nuance of Jóhannsson’s soundtracks.

To me, Jóhannsson’s songs have a quality of many complex works: less approachable than prominent alternatives, they’re also more lasting in their satisfactions. Zimmer’s ideas, even when they’re very good, tend to come from previous films; Jóhannsson’s borrowings from experimental composers brought new concepts into cinema. Jóhannsson is quintessentially an adult composer, while Zimmer is frequently childlike (though a certain childishness can be valuable in cinema).

Jóhannsson released an impressive solo album, Orphée, in 2016, but his post-Villeneuve film scores—for Mandy, The Mercy, and Mary Magdalene—are comparatively slight. Villeneuve held out the promise of working again with a composer he called a “creative brother.” It wasn’t to be.

In February 2018, after his manager alerted the authorities because he had missed their daily calls, Jóhannsson was found dead in his Berlin apartment. The toxicology report implicated a lethal combination of cocaine and flu medication. He was 48 years old. “We lost one of the greats,” as composer Dustin O’Halloran said, and this is all the Jóhannsson music we’ll get.