For this feature based on a story from the First World War that his grandfather told him, director Sam Mendes chose to film a two-hour-long sequence shot. The radical cinematic concept could have led the composer Thomas Newman to create a score with only one musical colour and theme. Therefore, in order to accompany this “pedestrian road-movie” telling the story of two British soldiers who are tasked with bringing a crucial message to another squad, the composer behind the score for Skyfall (another Mendes film) chose to play the card of eclecticism, but also of surprise. Before being released into the wild, the characters rush around the famous trenches of the Great War. In Up The Down Trench, Newman incorporates electronic elements (that are therefore anachronistic), in order to accompany this journey filmed by Steadicam. Are we in a modern video game or in a real-life documentary on the First World War? Such is the ambiguity of the cinematic tour de force in which the music plays such an essential part.
For other parts of the film, Thomas Newman is slightly more literal, using sonic textures as foggy as the plains of Northern France (The Boche) and incorporating particularly tense, nightmarish moments (Tripwire). Sometimes, the tension is more subtle like in the piece Gehenna, made up of 12 notes played on the piano (then by strings), grouped into four groups of three. Gehenna is a biblical place that signifies hell, which translates this melodic repetition, so discomforting in its strange irregularity. Alongside these atmospheres that are rare in Newman’s work, there are also ideas that conform more to his usual style, especially the tender and dream-like A Bit Of Tin and Come Back To Us. As for The Night Window, it’s probably one of the high points of the score due to its emotional scale. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz