The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion's adaptation of Thomas Savage's novel required a score for a landscape of suppressed violence and masculine performance, and Greenwood delivered something that sounds like the American West filtered through British experimental music. The banjo is the central sonic object — but not the banjo of country mythology; rather, the instrument played in ways it was never meant to be played, producing harmonics and textures that are genuinely unsettling. Greenwood places it in dialogue with strings and piano in configurations that sound formally academic but feel viscerally wrong. The score understands that the film is about repression — cultural, sexual, psychological — and constructs music that enacts repression formally, beautiful material constrained and distorted by the compositional logic surrounding it. There are passages of almost pastoral calm, but they never feel safe; the harmonic language keeps something threatening just below the surface. This is music that has deeply absorbed Ennio Morricone's Italian Western scores but has none of Morricone's flamboyance — it is internalized, withholding, refusing to explain itself. The listening experience alone, without the film, is of rigorously austere contemporary classical music that leaves a peculiar aftertaste, as though you have heard something that cannot quite be named. That unnamability is the score's central achievement.