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The Best Movie Scores of 2021

Join us as we count down the 15 best movie scores from 2021, which was a surprisingly good year for movie music.
Best Movie Scores
By  · Published on December 31st, 2021

5. The Power of the Dog

Jonny Greenwood had a superb year. His creative take on the Western, for Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, has the traditional genre sound in hand, but it’s different in the way he expresses it, twisting and expanding it until it’s as long and lonely as the Montana landscape.

The violins here are initially melancholy and sympathetic, but they soon inhabit his baroque style, which he still manages to keep intuned with the more traditional sounds. There’s a sense of potential violence and turbulence, exquisitely pinpointed by the impeccable string writing. The way Greenwood wrings out the tension underneath with a sense of regret and lament is just incredible, and it’s almost painful to listen to, so true is the composer’s aim. It’s a masterful score.


4. The Velvet Queen

This year brought some brilliant scores for documentary films. Along them is Nick Cave and Warren Ellis‘ evocative and lyrical work for Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier’s The Velvet Queen, about the snow leopard that stalks the Tibetan Highlands in Eastern Asia. The score instantly captures the soul of the titular creature and its forboding home, with a genuine reverence for the animal that inhabits the pair’s simply gorgeous writing, including a new song by Cave.

It’s a sparse piece that reflects the reclusive nature of the snow leopard as well as the desolate yet stunning frozen landscape, and Cave and Ellis infuse their score with tender vocals and beautiful string work that capitalises on the special nature of what is being shown. It’s just incredible, and another display of brilliance to add to the pair’s diverse body of film music work.


3. The Reason I Jump

Music in film is often used to subconsciously help the audience understand something from another point of view, which is certainly the case with Nainita Desai‘s quite lovely score to the autism-focused documentary The Reason I Jump. Loosely based on the novel of the same name, in which a 13-year old nonverbal autistic Japanese boy wrote about how he experiences the world, the film looks at several individuals across the world in similar situations. And Desai’s score helps to underline their lives with curiosity and beauty, without turning it into inspiration porn.

It’s a difficult score to describe. There’s a lot of detail in the music you might not pick up on straight away, which is linked to the way autistic people seem to see things, noticing small details first before seeing the big picture, It’s also not overbearing, which is especially important considering autistic persons often experience sensory overload.

Vocals are also used, but not in a way you would expect, with flittering snatches, also sublimely meditating on the difficulty in forming words and sentences. It’s about the right to exist and to be treated correctly, and Desai’s wonderful score is vitally important in pushing that notion forward.


2. Spencer

Jonny Greenwood is possibly the most talented composer working in film music today. His second entry on this list is his stunning score for Pablo Larrain’s Princess Diana biopic, Spencer. Infusing baroque music with free jazz, the score is idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it’s also brilliant in using that crossover as a metaphor for Diana’s move from the Royal family to “normal life”, with the Princess herself having to improvise while navigating uncharted waters.

What’s amazing is the way he strips everything down suddenly to her core, to her beauty, and the way he makes it seem effortless. Greenwood said Spencer felt like a horror movie to him, so some of it is filled with cacophonous moments that are utterly paralyzing yet mesmerizing, with the composer encouraging traditional orchestral musicians to experiment with free jazz techniques. But sometimes, you can just kick back and enjoy the sheer beauty that Greenwood gives Diana through his score. And marvel at his talent.


1. In The Earth

Clint Mansell‘s score for Ben Wheatley’s pandemic folk horror picture is something else. Full of paranoia, some of the music is literally taken from nature: Mansell connected sensors and microphones up to certain plants. And it envelops our senses and our reason and soaks our membranes, resulting in a dreamlike hallucination we can’t escape from.

Much of it is magical, a reconnection with wilderness and the spirit of the forest, but it is often terrifyingly bleak, at least until you tune into its wavelength. From then it becomes a symphony of the earth celebrating that which we have lost touch with, a relationship we need to reclaim. And from that, transcendence.

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Charlie Brigden is the author of many fine soundtrack liner notes and Blu-ray booklet essays and some call him a film music expert. He also recorded a commentary for Howard the Duck. You can find him on Twitter here: @brigdenwriter. (He/Him)