Today I saw The Green Knight, a psychedelic fantasy film by David Lowery. It is an adaptation of the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It is a whirlwind of unique cuts and visuals, fantastic performances and amazing sound design and score. In it’s score, the film relies on falsetto choirs which can range from suggesting terror to exaltation. It makes use of synths and strange sounds which can perhaps only moderately accurately be called percussion. In the track One Year Hence we get these aforementioned elements, there are the classic horror strings which build up to a crescendo and then stop and bring the listener into silence, in this almost murky nothing we are left with fragments of high strings and a bassy thudding. Out of this murk comes a deep and slightly alien trilling of a synth which feels monstrous in nature. Almost as if introducing this creature a choir calls out, this is layered with a throbbing synth which we are then left alone with as another hollow monstrous sound calls out to us, with a reverb to suggest a large space. The sound of what sounds like muffled machinery trills alongside more of this throbbing. We are then brought back to the choir as the song ends. This biblical and almost supernatural feeling is prominent throughout the film, Gawain is blessed with both Christian charms and also pagan spells, the forces of nature vs the artificiality of humanities creations is a common theme throughout and it feels as if this is most obvious in this track.
Something else that stood out to me was the sound of the green knights actual movements. Though he doesn’t feature heavily in the film his presence is extremely memorable. His movements sound like rotting wood being crushed and torn apart, his footsteps are deep and thunderous. He is the embodiment of nature and so his movements suggest a size much larger than he is and a presence that extends beyond his own form.
There were stylistic choices that really stood out to me also, I think I would need to watch the film again to properly analyse it as at the time I was totally enthralled as I sat in the cinema.