Poor Things

Certainly promising to be one of the most original silver screen outings this year, Searchlight’s Poor Things is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray and covers similar territory to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite), Bella Baxter (Emma Stone, who also serves as producer) is brought back to life by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe); Bella quickly decides to run off on an adventure with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) across continents in a quest to regain worldly experience after lost time.

Musically, Poor Things represents a shift for Lanthimos, as previously he used source music for his films. This time he recruited English musician Jerkin Fendrix to write an original score with a particularly unusual instrumentation, with the express goal of representing Bella’s psyche. Specifically, Fendrix’s goal was to have the instrumentation be “very emotionally vulnerable,” and as such he deferred to a mix of woodwinds, pipes, and synthesized breaths and vocals, coupled with mallets and strings, to deliver a sense of emotional vulnerability and complexity echoing Bella’s character.

At the beginning of the trailer, we hear a piano (or harp?) traversing a weird, pitch-bending mix of chords. Mirroring the music, we see Bella struggling to even walk in the first moment, (re)learning how. The score shifts tempo at 0:12 on a minor arpeggio with a hard-to-pinpoint collection of instruments—entering headfirst into a mix of the aforementioned synthesizers and vocals. Notice at 0:18 when Dr. Godwin Baxter states that Bella’s “brain and body are not quite synchronized,” we do hear a bass tone synched to Bella winking—but the bass tone itself lands outside the overall rhythm of the soundtrack.

At 0:26 the soundtrack shifts to a major tonality, coupled with a shift from black and white to colour in the visuals. We hear sustained tones in the vocals in the high register and a semi-random assortment of tones in the arpeggiated synths, with a few chromatic notes—the overall feel is ebullient, verging on manic. In showing Bella’s transformation, the visuals appear to briefly reference that of Maria in Lang’s Metropolis.

By 0:40, the still present synthesizers take a backseat to the organ which dominates the soundscape alongside the strings. Bella seems better able to talk and reason, and the music mirrors that relatively stability. A chord sequence that chromatically descends in the bass reaches a climax at the minor subdominant chord—modulating outside the key one more time for extra drama—which is cut short by Bella’s slap at 1:09 after the punned reference to Stanley’s immortal cry in A Streetcar Named Desire. A reprise of the motif from the trailer’s opening leads us out.

While there is a musical motif on either end of the trailer, what’s more important is the clearly unique sense of identity Fendrix’s music offers this film. We’re witnessing the beginning of a director/composer relationship that may or may not last beyond Poor Things, but there’s no doubt, if the trailer is anything to go by, that the music will offer much. We hear none of the traditional library tracks in this trailer: not only is the music a rich complement to the unique visual aesthetics of the film, but it also offers compelling emotional insight for the internal monologue of its protagonist.

Going by its trailer, it’s worth noting just how unique the end result for Poor Things promises to be in an industry inundated with safe-bet franchising—and it’s worth considering how much a bespoke musical voice reinforces the originality of this project.

Poor Things hits theatres December 8th.

— Curtis Perry