Score

The music written for a film, felt more than heard. It tells the audience how to feel a beat before the image has finished making its case.

The score is the film's emotional underwriting: it commits feeling beneath scenes that could read several ways, resolving ambiguity the image deliberately leaves open. Felt more than heard is precise, audiences rarely notice a score working, only its absence or its lies.

Its danger is exactly its power: music that insists on an emotion the scene has not earned reads, eventually, as distrust of the audience. The finest scores arrive late and leave early, letting silence do the difficult scenes. The same judgement governs motion and sound on our surfaces: underline what is true, and never louder than the truth.