The Sound of Things About to Go Wrong

The guitarist of Radiohead might seem an unlikely heir to the great film composers, but Greenwood arrived already steeped in the modernist concert tradition — Penderecki, Messiaen, the violent string clusters and microtonal slides of mid-century classical music — and he turned that vocabulary into one of the most distinctive scoring voices in modern cinema. His breakthrough, for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, announced everything: strings that saw and scrape and refuse to resolve, a music of pure mounting dread that sits over the film like a held breath, telling you that something is wrong with this man and this land long before the plot confirms it. The score does not underline the emotion of a scene; it generates an anxiety the images alone would not carry, a sense of wrongness seeping in from the edges.

This is Greenwood's signature: the score as a source of unease rather than feeling. Across his collaborations with Anderson — The Master, Phantom Thread, Inherent Vice — and with others, in Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here and Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, he builds music that withholds resolution, that grinds and shimmers and refuses the comfort of a tonic chord, keeping the nervous system taut. Phantom Thread is the surprising proof of his range — there the dread is replaced by a swooning, obsessive romanticism, but the principle holds: the music expresses an interior state the surface conceals, the lush score revealing the suffocating obsession beneath the elegant manners.

What makes Greenwood an author across his directors is that he has restored to film music a register it had largely abandoned for comfort: genuine dissonance, the unresolved and the disturbing, the willingness to make an audience anxious rather than soothed. Most film scoring resolves; it tells you the hero is winning, the lovers are uniting, the danger has passed, delivering emotional reassurance in a familiar harmonic language. Greenwood declines the reassurance. His scores hold tension without release, sit in the dissonance, refuse to tell you it will be all right — and in doing so they make the films feel more dangerous, more uncertain, more alive to the possibility that things will not, in fact, resolve. He scores the anxiety of modern life, the sense of something wrong that cannot be named or fixed.

In this he is the contemporary heir of Bernard Herrmann — the other composer who used dissonance and the unresolved to score psychological states the image could not show — updated with the full vocabulary of twentieth-century classical dread. Greenwood proved that a rock musician could bring to film a sophistication of unease that the industry's comfortable scoring traditions had forgotten, and that the most modern thing a film score can do is refuse to comfort you. His music is the sound of things about to go wrong, sustained and unresolved, and it has made the films it inhabits more unbearable, more tense, and more true to a world that does not always resolve into harmony. He scores the dread we live in.

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The line: There Will Be Blood → The Master → Inherent Vice → You Were Never Really Here → Phantom Thread → The Power of the Dog

This line crosses:

• The Heir Who Became an Original — Greenwood's scores are inseparable from Paul Thomas Anderson's mature films; the dissonant dread of There Will Be Blood and The Master is half the achievement.
• The Sound of the Inside — Greenwood is Herrmann's contemporary heir: the composer who uses dissonance and the unresolved to score a psychological state the image conceals.

Read through: interviews with Jonny Greenwood on his film scoring and classical influences (Penderecki, Messiaen) · critical writing on the PTA–Greenwood collaboration.

A note on the argument: Greenwood's classical influences, his rock background, and his film collaborations are documented record. The framing of his signature as the score as unease — restoring dissonance and the unresolved to film music, the heir of Herrmann — is this essay's reading.