The soundtrack composer of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness is subverting the status quo of contemporary film music. Is a new wave of composer-director creative partnerships possible?

What are the elements that drive a filmmaker to catalyse their entire art in the hands of a single composer? Their vision of the world, their artistic signature and the themes that form an authentic and unique aesthetic? Today, speaking of artistic symbiosis between directors and composers is rare. If since the birth of sound films every great director has associated their name to a single composer, indissolubly linking their cinematic vision with well-recognisable musical compositions, in contemporary cinema isn’t quite the same. There is, instead, an increasing tendency not to consider the composer as a central and strategic figure to the success of a film, despite the success of several recent blockbusters, including Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest, owes much to their sound design and music. 

Who could, therefore, lay the path to a new and encouraging way? Partly overshadowed by Ludwig Göransson’s magnificent work for Oppenheimer – which bagged him the Best Original Score statuette at the Oscars – this year a very young composer, Jerskin Fendrix, made his big debut in the world of film music, and at the Academy Awards gala. Hailing from Shropshire, in the English countryside, and cutting his teeth somewhere between sacred music and Aphex Twin, Fendrix was able to translate Yorgos Lanthimos’ vision into sound. The director, who never before Poor Things had collaborated with a single composer, has now chosen Fendrix again for Kinds of Kindness, in theatres from 6 June. 

Music in Lanthimos’ films, ever since Kinetta, has always represented a very specific narrative end. His works, structured according to the canons of a contemporary form of Greek tragedy, in which each protagonist defies the conventions of social reality by setting themselves against fate, find in music the narrative expedient for analysing said process. It is above all the chorus, which cadences the narrative intervals, that helps to contextualise the events that take place on stage.

Moving between irony and desecrating terror, Lanthimos relies above all on the sound matrix of cultured, avant-garde music, rich in dissonances and clusters. By creating a striking contrast with the images, it progressively shatters the harmonic and psychic balance of an apparent tranquillity he has constructed. This is demonstrated by the ingenious use of electronic music in The Lobster as a reaction to the mating society (‘we all dance by ourselves, that’s why we only play electronic music’). The atonal music, just like in Stanley Kubrick’s cinema, provokes in the spectator a veiled disorientation and an absence of balance that throws them directly into the heart of the tragedy, with a growing feeling of unease: the terror of oneself and of the disturbing paths of the human soul.

Fendrix’s training is articulated in multiple forms and compositional avenues that perfectly encapsulate these feelings and moods. Listening to his debut album Winterreise, with which he came to the attention of Lanthimos, it is difficult to pin him down to a precise genre. Revolving around the structures of chart pop, the music is at constant acoustic and physical mutation, recalling that plastic vortex that made SOPHIE’s work unique, as well as Arca’s electro-acoustic manipulations.

Fendrix himself stated in a 2020 interview for The Line of Best Fit: ‘I would never call myself a shock artist. I’m not just spreading senseless images of massacres or trying to cause an uprising among people’. Although his art may be unrepentant and convoluted, there is enough cohesion in his work to pique anyone’s curiosity. ‘It is the separation between something surprising and something shocking. That’s the hallmark of an artist, I guess’.

Nonetheless, the urge to shock has always been at the heart of Fendrix’s musical function, as witnessed also by the music composed for the reinterpretation of the play Ubu Roi by the French playwright Alfred Jarry and staged at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A work that the Guardian described as atonal, abrasive and strident. And what better director than Lanthimos could have exalted its purest form to the point of making it his directorial signature in music.

Poor Things undoubtedly represented something never heard before in the world of contemporary film music. Not only did the young composer draw on Disneyesque overtures, especially suitable in framing the fairy-tale ending of Lanthimos’ work, but he deconstructed them into experimental form. The outcome is a work that shows the depth of Fendrix’s studies and that nods to Ligeti’s atonal avant-garde and the obscure rhythmic and vocal concatenations of his compositions such as Lux Aeterna and Requiem III Dies Irae. Every orchestral section he composes seems to perpetually correspond to Bella Baxter’s anatomical genesis. From the tuning instruments that denote the protagonist’s new bodily form, to the use of the increasingly preponderant chorus to accompany her developmental stages: Fendrix is to all intents and purposes the Dr. Frankenstein of Poor Things. 

“I spent some time at the Wellcome Collection, the medical research library in London, looking at technically contemporary surgical documents and trying to think what ideas I could get from them. The process of getting a sound like this requires a lot of research and thinking about how to implement it in an abstract way,’ Fendrix explained.

What is even more astonishing when analysing the arrival of the alien Fendrix in the world of film music is how the work done for Kinds of Kindness departs radically from what was done in Poor Things, channelling an even more experimental edge.

Listening to the dissonant and tense approach of the strident John Cage-prepared piano, which emphasises the malignity of the world and its inconsistencies, one denotes a total freedom towards the musical matter, as well as a disinterest in what until now were the dogmas of music for images. One also thinks of the accusatory chorus that seems to represent the audience’s view of what is happening on stage. A composition enriched by the vocal particle section that seems reminiscent of the structure of ‘Vien-Ni’, composed by Ennio Morricone for Vittorio De Sisti’s film Quando l’amore è sensualità (1973). All elements that make the Englishman one of the most interesting composers for the years to come.

‘I love working with Jerskin and I guess that is why I am now working with a composer. I found someone who works well for me,’ Lanthimos confirms. ‘Jerskin worked on this film in the same way he worked on Poor Things: he started writing the soundtrack before he had even seen a single frame of the film. I gave him the script and started sending him some black and white photographs I had taken on the set. From the beginning, our agreement was this: I told him that this time I wanted to use a piano and a choir, a very different style from Poor Things. When I started editing the film, I had a library of music created by Jerskin to work with, and the result was great’.

As Paul Thomas Anderson said: ‘to make a film, the director’s last great collaborator is the composer precisely because of the knowledge he has of the total montage and the end that that film will have’. Listening to his words, one cannot help but consider how the Fendrix-Lanthimos professional liaison is once again bringing this element to light, allowing us to get to know and discover one of the most interesting and unconventional composers of music for images in recent years.

Opening image: Jerrod Carmichael on the set of Poor Things. Photo by Atsushi Nishijima. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved.