Take Shelter
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1675192/
Everything got in a bit of rush and I ended up getting to the cinema late, and couldn't remember the name of the film I wanted to see, and because the trailers had been on for 10 minutes it had already disappeared from the boards. I told the guy on the desk it was called something like "impending doom" and he managed to get it from that, which kind of tells you that this is not a hugely jolly film, and not a very comfortable two hours of viewing, but that's not a bad thing in this case. A guy appears to be going crazy - there's a family history - and has terrible dreams and hallucinations about a coming storm with weird rain that turns everyone into psychos wanting to kill him. Paranoid delusion, anyone? He builds an elaborate storm shelter in his garden, pretty much much destroying his life in the process, which you see coming from the word go. Not going to give too much else away, other than to say that is definitely worth seeing and that the ending left me with a strong desire to say "oops".
The score is by David Wingo, not a name I've come across before, who has worked on half a dozen or so films to date, three of them directed by David Gordon Green. Take Shelter was directed by Jeff Nichols, who has already signed Wingo up to do his next film, Mud, in 2013, so they both like him and I can see why. The scoring strategy is built around a clever little musical conceit that actually works really well. Curtis, the central character, has a daughter who is deaf. It is evidently a fairly recent occurrence. She, therefore, has lost her hearing, while he is starting to suffer from aural delusions: he starts hearing the sound of thunder on cloudless days. Hearing sounds that have no external cause? Well, that's potentially a definition of tinnitus, from the Latin for ringing, and the same root as tintinnabulation, the sound of bells. The score picks up on these ideas of hearing, of sounds which may or may not be there, the idea of tinnitus and of ringing, and the result is a score that uses the gentle sound of bells (he's a bit Mychael Danna in terms of his attention to specific timbral detail), especially in scenes involving the little girl and Curtis's concerns about the storm, and piercing sine tones, sometimes (briefly) uncomfortably loud in scenes associated with his fears that he is going mad, and his horribly real dreams. It's a good score, a subtle piece of writing that doesn't overplay its hand but manages to be very unsettling nonetheless. Mr Wingo could be one to watch (or listen out for, as the case may be).
