Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #2,053
Written 9/17/23
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Buy it... if you'd like to study a massive intellectual misfire by
an esteemed director who demanded vaguely musical sound effects in lieu
of a functional film score.
Avoid it... if you already have a low opinion of Hildur
Guðnadóttir's style of writing, for she offers almost nothing
of value in her extremely sparse and emotionless minimalism for this
story.
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| Guðnadóttir |
A Haunting in Venice: (Hildur
Guðnadóttir) For his third stint directing and starring as
Agatha Christie's famed detective, Hercule Poirot, Kenneth Branagh
decided to take a supernatural path in tackling 2023's A Haunting in
Venice. Retired in Venice, Poirot is talked into attending a
séance at the mansion of an opera singer who is a part of a
scheme to discredit the medium performing it. Of course, a grisly murder
results, and Poirot not only must solve the killing of the evening but
also unravel a twisted past involving the characters, all the while
battling his own hallucinations. The film lacks the glamour of the prior
two entries in the franchise, replacing it with jump scares and other
techniques common to the horror genre. Reactions were relatively
positive, but some audiences won't be able to sit through the
contemplative pacing of the execution. The scores by Patrick Doyle for
Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile are
both attractive orchestral dramas with notable highlights. Rather that
turn once again to that trusted collaborator of decades, however,
Branagh sought a completely new direction for the music in A Haunting
in Venice. He wanted as little music in the picture as possible, a
strategy meant to accentuate the sound effects that characters and
audience members are meant to discern. What music that did appear in the
film was instructed to be small, dark, moody, confined, and
claustrophobic. For Branagh, this equation led him in search of a very
sparsely rendered chamber score without any of the romantic
sensibilities that Venice would otherwise suggest. He apparently decided
that Doyle wasn't the right composer to generate that type of score and
instead sought industry darling Hildur Guðnadóttir. Psychic
pain has come to define the Icelandic composer's career, and it makes
for unpleasant music, but her distinctive techniques were intended to
represent Poirot's inner turmoil in this story. A major Christie fan
herself, Guðnadóttir approached the assignment
intellectually, studying the music of Italian composers from the era and
attempting to discern the difference in the classical music from before
and after World War II. Writing the score in the traditional method with
a pencil, she devised what she viewed as an appropriately off-kilter
expression of melody and tonality for both the time period and main
character.
The resulting score for
A Haunting in Venice is
both short and extremely understated. Guðnadóttir ignores the
proven methodology of film scoring at her peril, producing music that is
better defined as muted musical sound effects rather than a conventional
narrative. She employs only a few strings and woodwinds with a
chamber-like tone and extremely dry environment, only two or three cues
combining the two sections of the orchestra to muster any significant
volume. The supernatural elements are handled by musicians bowing under
the bridge of a string or overblowing and screaming into woodwinds, all
of which distinctly dissonant as a result. But none of it is remotely
unnerving; rather, it's merely mildly annoying. Much of it is barely
audible. The lack of depth in the ensemble hampers any sense of dread
intended. The composer does explore melodic inclinations, but she
achieves absolutely no end with them. The main theme on low strings only
in "Haunt" is described by Guðnadóttir as a "sort of melodic
movement that doesn't really go anywhere," a description that also
applies to everything she conjures later in the work. Although meant for
dreamy introspection, these performances are completely devoid of any
passion, distinction, or even humanity. The thematic material does not
remain consistent throughout the few moments of development in the
score, either, eventually evolving into a fuller idea in "Money in the
Mattress" that likewise lacks any care or resolution. Poirot is a
fascinating and incredibly deep character, but Branagh and
Guðnadóttir reduce him to a mere tool for cheap scares and
psychological horror. Even if some listeners can find solace in the very
shallow, intimate melodic expressions of nothingness, the remainder of
the score is driven by the acoustic use of the instruments as sound
effects. While abstraction isn't by itself a detriment, the absence of
musical norms means that a sound designer could have assembled some of
this material and achieved equally effective results for Branagh. In the
end, the copious intellectual explanations of this score's tepid,
soulless personality cannot change the fact that Guðnadóttir
has provided substanceless, emotionless, and gutless "music" for a
Hercule Poirot film. Much of this misfire is owed to Branagh for failing
to recognize that a strict avant-garde approach was a poor choice, one
destined to leave listeners wondering why any film score was written for
the film at all. The only distinguishing characteristic of the music for
A Haunting in Venice is its totally inscrutable and meaningless
existence.
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