Shining Girls

Based on the best-selling novel by Lauren Beukes, the upcoming series Shining Girls follows Kirby Mazrachi (Elizabeth Moss, who is also executive produces), a reporter based in Chicago who as a victim of assault attempts to track down her attacker. Things become more complex when she learns that a murder in the area is linked to her case.

Throughout, then, there’s a theme of listening to survivors of trauma; the soundtrack is relatively spare but effective, ceding space to the dialogue while also lending a sense of propulsive drama. After a six-second microteaser, we begin intimately, with the sound (and close-up shot) of a pencil drift across paper and ephemeral, haunting synths in the background. At 0:14 we hear a minor crescendo on the upper register as Mazrachi pessimistically states “it won’t work; no one knows him” as they try to pin down a lead. There’s a pitched hit at the reveal of the Apple TV logo—the pitch will keep playing in the background and will return almost leitmotivically, as both a point of stability and driving force.

The next scene at 0:22 opens with the localizing sound of the elevated train in Chicago. Off-screen, there’s the occasional rhythmically synched sound of a gun loading—perhaps reflecting the trauma of the lead character. By 0:36 we hear barely audible chanting female voices added to the arrangement. A car honking at 0:38 provides another crescendo that leads to a suddenly—and proportionally—quiet scene inside the train at 0:41, alongside some ticking to increase the tension. This is where the arrangement really starts to pick up: by 0:50, a piano note, high-pitched sound, and a hint of a melody coalesce to punctuate Mazrachi’s monologue on remembering her assailant. Notice at 0:56 how the match cuts synch precisely to the ticking, which is now in double time—ending at 0:58 with what is, presumably, the first appearance of said assailant.

The next section after the minute mark introduces some tersely played cello and percussive accents that get more and more raucous. Notice at 1:18 the audiovisual counterpoint when the assailant tears the wing off a bee, and it’s met with loud, percussive snap—it mirrors the lead character’s internal sense of feeling on edge and attempts to sonically reflect? interrogate the trauma that resides within her.

The arrangement continues to build and grow in intensity, culminating at 1:25 with a traditional phone ringing. Interestingly, the way it’s mixed makes the phone ringing seem to almost traverse the soundtrack to the diegetic world in a crescendo (mirroring the previous crescendi). (The spoken questions “Why are you doing this?” then sound like it’s being transmitted through that older phone.) A moment later, the train’s horn likewise exits, lingering after the image cuts to black.

In the final sequence, a melodic motif finally forms—a semi-tone, with a considerable sense of instability to it through glissandi, with an almost microtonal flavour to it. (Note also with the actors’ title cards the use of typewriter sounds synched to the beat—a neat if relatively inconsequential touch.) The wordless female voices that serve to rhythmically punctuate the trailer become their most vocal at 2:11 with the title card—perhaps the ghostly sounds of the titular “Shining Girls” in question? Whatever the case, the insistence not on musical song or even theme, but rather mostly on texture and timbre are what make this trailer work: it’s the dogged insistence on building an arrangement that induces unease that allows it to communicate how it is a series that will seriously delve into trauma.

Shining Girls arrives on Apple TV+ April 29th.

— Curtis Perry