The Levelling- film score reviews
Just to keep a record of the comments and reactions to the soundtrack.
Composer Hutch Demouilpied’s sparse, spine-tingling musical cues combine plaintive keyboards with low strings, processed voices, wind instruments and musical saw, physical sounds that seem to bubble up from the soil.
Hutch Demouilpied’s excellent, sparingly used score suddenly takes on a keening electro edge, over underwater shots of a hare paddling through cloudy water — the film’s oddly macabre emblem.
This combination of the real and something of surreal expressionism is aided in no small part by cinematographer Nanu Segal’s work, photographing the bleak, damp, yet beautiful landscape and the humans who work on it, and the score by Hutch Demouilpied, which seeks to both draw out and reflected the tension, anger, and love between father and daughter.
Film View
Hutch Demouilpied’s wonderful and evocative score, utilizing both strings and electronic elements, at times quiet and at times almost horrific.
The soundtrack is cherry picked too, with Hutch Demouilpied’s pivoted score taking us from the lamented strings and sporadic keys of a house revisited, to the white noise nightmare of the film’s most (for me) harrowing scene. Audio and visual are wonderfully tied together.
The music, carefully orchestrated by Hutch Demouilpied is used to enhance the silence between words, to articulate through the hush of what the characters aren’t saying.
Film List
The sombre realism is compounded by their chosen colour palette, which is washed with grey and brown, and by the haunting soundtrack of Hutch Demouilpied.
“Only occasionally does Leach allow Hutch Demouilpied’s eerie yet elegiac compositions to interrupt that silence, the intense focus on Kendrick’s reactions and exploration lifting away as she treads, reflectively perhaps…..”
One Room With a View “expertly controlled and assembled, with convincingly detailed sets and a barely-there score which never crowds the central performances.”
This from filmclub.org “Any quiet in the film is often complemented by Hutch Demouilpied’s contemplative and probing soundtrack.”
The music of the film is at times piercing but cleverly encompasses the tension of the relations
The Playlist said “an innovative score by Hutch Demouilpied.…… creates a very particular, very distinct mood, mournful but never becoming completely bleak, realistic but never quite down-to-earth, ominous but always deeply human…..”
Composer James Joshua Otto- “Saw The Levelling this evening an absolutely wonderful, distinctive score…”
Glasgow film festival 2017 http://www.entertainmentfuse.com/glasgow-film-festival-2017-review-the-levelling/
“The Levelling has a high, electronic score which gave the movie a haunting quality. It was impactful when showing flashbacks to the party and showing the desolate flat landscape of the Somerset Levels and seeing the wildlife carry on as the family disintegrates.”