Both of Greenwood’s latest scores are spectacular (even the eight seconds of original material he contributed to “Licorice Pizza” stands out from the rest of PTA’s killer soundtrack), but “The Power of the Dog” wins by a snout because its music feels less ornamental and more intimately expressive than the funereal acid jazz and corrupted organ partitas that form the bars of Princess Diana’s gilded cage.
Radiohead-obsessed cinephiles have spent the past 16 years or so foaming at the mouth about how their favorite band’s virtuosic multi-instrumentalist has casually developed a side gig as one of the most essential film composers of the 21st century
Campion has a long history of getting the best out of world-class composers like Michael Nyman and Mark Bradshaw, and she does so again in her dagger-like frontier drama by encouraging Greenwood to create his own syntax of menace — seductive but threatening.
The work that resulted from that free rein falls somewhere between “Phantom Thread” and “There Will Be Blood,” combining repressed French horns, a mechanically detuned piano that plays along with Kirstin Dunsts’ performance in broken time, and a cello masquerading as a banjo in order to sew together a Western soundscape that’s constricting tighter in the middle while fraying along the edges. And then, in the transcendent “Psalm 22,” that tension resolves into a new and delightfully violent lightness that lingers under your skin long after the movie is over.
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