Surgery (Poor Things)

The unsettling heart of the score — a queasy, somewhat carnivalesque piece that wraps the horror of what's happening in bodies with the curiosity of a scientist who sees only possibility. Desplat uses theremin-adjacent tones alongside conventional orchestra to create something that occupies a no-man's-land between medicinal and magical. The rhythm is irregular, as if tracking a heartbeat that hasn't yet decided on its own pattern. There's comedy buried in the grotesque, which is exactly the film's register — you're never quite sure whether to be disturbed or delighted, and the music refuses to resolve that ambiguity. It's Victorian and futuristic simultaneously, which mirrors the film's own anachronistic visual language. For listeners interested in how music can hold contradiction — holding the comic and the horrifying in the same phrase — this is essential study material.