MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

The Watchers is a new supernatural horror film, and is the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, the 25-year-old daughter of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. She previously directed and wrote several episodes of the horror TV series Servant, for which her father was the showrunner, and also directed the second unit on her father’s films Old and Knock at the Cabin, but this marks the first feature film project of her own. The film is based on the 2022 novel of the same name by A. M. Shine and stars Dakota Fanning as Mina, an American artist living in Ireland, who gets stranded in an expansive, untouched forest when her car breaks down. Seeking shelter, she eventually becomes trapped in a glass-walled bunker alongside three strangers, who reveal that they are stalked by mysterious creatures every night if they try to escape.

It’s a fascinating premise that blends Celtic folklore with contemporary horror, has some unexpected twists and turns, and is helped enormously both by Ishana Night Shyamalan’s confident and stylish direction, and by Dakota Fanning’s leading performance as the luminous and mysterious Mina. Also contributing enormously to the atmospherics of the whole project is the score, by the Los Angeles-based Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski. This is Korzeniowski’s first project since Till and Emily in 2022, and is only his fourth project this decade so far – a frustratingly meager output for a composer of his talent and who, purely for selfish reasons, I wish was writing and releasing film scores much more frequently. Thankfully, such is their quality, all new Korzeniowski scores are worth waiting for, and The Watchers is no exception.

The score is a challenging, complex, sophisticated horror score that is very much in the same mold as his scores for the horror TV series Penny Dreadful, and subsequent film works like The Nun. In the album’s publicity material Korzeniowski reveals some of his thoughts and inspirations for the score’s sound and orchestration, saying; “My music harks back to the tribal, pagan rituals of pre-Celtic Ireland, expressing primal, animalistic energy in its unadorned and raw form. The score features experimental acoustic instruments (daxophone, harbor drum) alongside the classical orchestra. I spent a few days on the set in Ireland, and the forest where the shooting took place was one of the most incredible locations I’ve ever seen. Every tree was soaking and brimming with life, with intertwined layers of moss in every shade of green covering the ground like a sponge. The sound of the forest was mesmerizing, and I wanted to capture that feeling in the score. I aimed to reflect the complexity of the natural environment without the constraints of modern, digital precision. I consciously avoided the traditional orchestral effects, like clusters, that have become clichéd in the horror genre, instead opting for the distinctive wooden sound of the daxophone, recorded to magnetic tape.”

There’s a wonderful, elegant main theme introduced in the opening cue, “The Dying Gods,” a scintillating bank of layered strings and dark, brooding brass, defaced by all manner of sound effects and percussive textures that give the whole piece an oppressive mood. It’s a superb piece, vintage Korzeniowski. Later cues like “Point of No Return,” “Into the Woods,” and the impressively expansive and sometimes unexpectedly emotional “Escape” also prominently feature the strong classical strings. “Stachys Sylvatica” has a pretty piano motif running through it, and “It’s Not Him” is strongly focused on a layer of luxurious cellos, while “I Wanna Be Like Lucy,” “Mural,” and “The Woman in the Photos” are an excellent combination of both.

What I really like about these parts of the score is how quickly and easily Korzeniowski can flip a switch and move away from rich elegance, and adopt instead a more aggressive, propulsive approach, underlining the horror and menace lurking deep in the woods. Throughout the score you never feel too far removed from that dreadful feeling of unease, an unnerving sense that no matter how much the music may lull you into a sense of security with lyrical cello passages or gentle pianos, something truly horrifying is lying in wait just around the corner.

I also like the fact that, for the most part, Korzeniowski has stayed far away from anything stereotypically ‘Irish’ in the music. It would have been very easy for him to slap a fiddle or an uilleann pipe on to this thing as a way of conveying the film’s setting, and call it a day, but Korzeniowski is a more erudite composer than that. Instead, as he said in his publicity material, some of Korzenioswki’s music seems to reach back much further in time to something naturalistic, raw, almost primordial; the use of chimes and finger-cymbals in cues like “Into the Woods” and “The Door in the Floor” is especially notable in this regard.

A lot of the rest of the score is quite difficult, especially in scenes which involve the Watchers themselves, and the startling revelations as to their true nature. The eerie, scraping sound of the daxophone is very prominent in many cues, notably the aforementioned “Point of No Return,” “Welcome to the Show,” “The Burrow,” and the strikingly portentous “Birds Are Gone”. Then in cues like the menacing latter half of “What Book Am I Reading?” and the intense “Tree Hiders” Korzeniowski adopts some more aggressively brassy action music stylistics which are tremendously exciting.

It is in these moments that the score becomes much more challenging as a listening experience; some of the sounds Korzeniowski creates with his unconventional experimental acoustic instruments come close to the avant-garde sound of musique concrete, and they do not make for easy listening. However, as anyone who read my review of the score for The Nun knows, there is sometimes a world of difference between music that I enjoy and music that is good – and this is a prime example of that. While I cannot honestly say that I actually like listening to this music, its effectiveness in context, and the exceptional creativity Korzeniowski has shown in its creation, cannot be denied.

The penultimate cue, “Metamorphosis,” revisits the main theme of the film with more than a hint of tragedy, as some of the secrets of who the Watchers are are revealed to an incredulous Mina. Here, for the first time since the opening cue, Korzeniowski adopts an air of beatific lyricism, although the unusual creaking tones of the daxophone are still never far away. Then, in the conclusive “A Little Girl, Sometimes,” the piano takes center stage, performing a tender and emotional variation on the score’s main theme in Korzeniowski’s inimitable rich, classical style. It’s just superb.

The Watchers is an excellent score, one that blends several sequences of lovely, darkly romantic, thematic orchestral writing with a great deal of challenging, sometimes unexpectedly disturbing, avant-garde dissonance. Fans of his horror writing before – especially, as I mentioned, scores like Penny Dreadful and The Nun – will find that The Watchers occupies a middle ground between the two; it doesn’t have the same amount of Gothic melodrama of the former, not does it have the overwhelmingly aggressive attack of the latter, and I suspect many will find this to be a perfect balance of the two styles. It’s yet another outstanding effort by Abel Korzeniowski, with my only disappointment being that it has been far too long since his last score, and that I hope we don’t have to wait as long for the next one.

Buy the Watchers soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• The Dying Gods (2:03)
• Point of No Return (3:24)
• Into the Woods (3:05)
• Welcome to the Show (2:41)
• Stachys Sylvatica (3:19)
• The Burrow (3:04)
• What Book Am I Reading? (4:01)
• January (3:26)
• Tree Hiders (3:05)
• The Door in the Floor (3:24)
• Escape (5:07)
• It’s Not Him (2:44)
• I Wanna Be Like Lucy (1:53)
• Mural (3:29)
• The Woman in the Photos (2:23)
• Birds Are Gone (4:48)
• Metamorphosis (2:17)
• A Little Girl, Sometimes (2:46)

Watertower Music (2024)

Running Time: 56 minutes 51 seconds

Music composed and conducted by Abel Korzeniowski. Orchestrations by Abel Korzeniowski. Recorded and mixed by James T. Hill. Edited by Del Spiva. Album produced by Abel Korzeniowski and Mina Korzeniowski.