The Sound of the Inhuman

When Jonathan Glazer needed music for Under the Skin — a film told largely from the point of view of an alien wearing a human woman's body, hunting men — Mica Levi gave him a score unlike anything in mainstream cinema: detuned strings that slide and lurch with a queasy, seasick wrongness, a viola that seems to be learning what a human emotion is and getting it almost but not quite right, a sound that is seductive and repellent at once. The music is the alien's perspective — a consciousness approximating human feeling from the outside, never quite landing on it, the strings sliding between the notes a human composer would have hit cleanly. Levi scored not a character's emotion but the absence of human emotion, the view from outside, and the effect is genuinely uncanny in a way film music almost never achieves.

The signature is estrangement through detuning and slippage. Levi, who comes from outside the film-composing establishment (as a pop and experimental musician), treats pitch and tuning as plastic, sliding between and around the notes, bending the orchestra into shapes that feel organic and wrong at the same time, more like a body or a creature than an instrument. For The Zone of Interest — a film about a Nazi family living in domestic comfort beside Auschwitz — Levi's score works at the threshold of audibility, a low dread and abstract sound-design that scores the unspeakable by refusing to render it, the music as estranged from normal feeling as the family is from the horror next door. In both cases the music carries a perspective the image cannot show: the inhuman, the monstrous-as-banal, the view from a place outside ordinary human sympathy.

This places Levi in a lineage of film composers who use dissonance and the avant-garde to reach states beyond conventional emotion — close kin to Jonny Greenwood's dread and the modernist concert tradition both draw on (Penderecki, Ligeti, the sliding tone-clusters that Kubrick used in 2001 to score the genuinely alien). But Levi's register is distinct: not dread exactly but wrongness, the queasy slippage of a perspective that is not ours, the sound of feeling approximated from outside. Where most scores deepen our identification with a character, Levi's estrange us from the human entirely, which is the harder and rarer thing.

Levi's significance is the demonstration that the film score can be a tool of radical perspective — that music can carry not just a character's emotion but the unsettling absence or alienness of it, the view from outside the human. By refusing the orchestra's reassuring competence, by detuning and sliding and approximating, Levi scores the things cinema struggles to show: the alien gaze, the banality of monstrousness, the consciousness that is almost but not quite one of us. It is the sound of the inhuman, composed by one of the few willing to make film music genuinely strange — and in its strangeness, genuinely new.

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The line: Under the Skin → The Zone of Interest

This line crosses:

• Consumed by the Image — Under the Skin turns the gaze inside out, and Levi's queasy, sliding score is the sound of that alien perspective harvesting the men who cannot stop looking.
• The Sound of Things About to Go Wrong — Levi and Greenwood are the avant-garde wing of contemporary scoring, both drawing on the modernist concert tradition to reach states beyond conventional film emotion.

Read through: interviews with Mica Levi on scoring Under the Skin · writing on avant-garde and dissonant film music.

A note on the argument: Levi's detuned, estranging scores for Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest are documented record. The framing of the signature as the sound of the inhuman — scoring perspectives outside ordinary human emotion through detuning and slippage — is this essay's reading.