Radioactive

Due in North American theatres this March, the British production Radioactive is a dramatic biopic about the discoverer of radioactivity and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. While the trailer score is relatively standard fare considering the genre and subject matter, a few key synch points and a clever, aurally ambiguous moment distinguish this trailer from others like it.

The trailer opens with a descending series of piano chords that leads to a brief string passage, igniting into a choral texture at the thirty second mark, where the music synchs with the fire that is consuming the papers. Brief scientific sequences with corresponding sound effects on screen exemplify and punctuate the dialogue of Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike); additionally, at 0:39 the aural flourish of an old photograph being taken is slotted nicely into the percussion backdrop, synchronized with an apparent effortlessness. 

The music recedes but retains a passionate tone, with an arc of strings rising stepwise in a minor key as Marie Curie fervently explains the potential impact of her scientific work. Female vocals enter again at 0:47 with the director’s title card. The soundscape gets especially interesting at about the 1:12 mark, however, as the vocals become interleaved with the sound of a siren — it’s very subtle, but the evocative glissando of the rising voice is taken over and matched by the siren, as the alarm elides beauty and each evokes the other. 

Said alarm begins to eclipse the remainder of the track, clearly demarcated from the rest of the musical arrangement that churns along in epic style nonetheless. The siren sound retains a sense of intimacy with Marie Curie’s struggle even as the scenes display a wider world at play. At 1:27 the turn to silence is reserved for Curie facing the crowd at the end of, presumably, an important academic lecture—note how the women in the crowd applause first. The trailer ends somewhat abruptly after this with a final orchestral note.

Though a shorter trailer spot at roughly a minute and a half, it’s again that graceful transition from vocal music to siren sound effect that effectively conveys this palpable sense of drama and alarm — and the rational fear of unknown scientific territory — that does much to render this trailer so effective. It’s ultimately less about the life and discoveries of an exceptional scientist, and more about the society against which she had to grapple to be granted the recognition she deserved.

— Curtis Perry