Movies are collective achievements. We may invoke the vision of a particular director, but behind it there is a concerted effort of departments and people that transforms, enriches and breathes life into that vision. From the thousand assistants who are in the studio to ensure the smoothness of the shoot, to the costume department, make-up, effects, props etc and of course the music, it creates a problem of too many independent variables, how will all these be able to parts to coexist and harmonize, which of course almost never materializes as satisfactorily as it could on paper.
Regarding music, very briefly and briefly, its presence can have a thousand roles, a simple carpet on which the always, to come forward and stand out, to set the tone and style of the film, to tell the story and situations of characters, parts, etc.
I want to focus on how Nathan Johnson separates the theme of Knives Out from that of Glass Onion, differentiating how each sets the tone for the mystery to follow.
Knives Out is a classic whodunit. The imposing, Gothic mansion of the Thrombeys, the "European" area of New England, this whole autumn setting of fallen leaves and cozy sweaters is the graphic model - regardless of the scriptural liberties it takes with the form - of an honest, traditional, British Roots Whodunit. Hence Nathan Johnson's choice to put us in the film with only a spare, claustrophobic, edgy string quartet and G minor, in a purely neo-romantic style of chamber music, condensing and distilling all of the above, along with the Cyrillic gossip of the Thrombeys, Blanc's detective eye and the hunt for the truth.
All these boundaries are broken on Glass Onion with an explosion of grandeur and blue vastness after a Poirot-esque harpsichord introduction. In the sequel, everything is - hilariously - bigger, and this comes in from the first moment, when the neurotic quartet trochade of the first film, has given way to a light and layered neoclassical flow of a full orchestra, rather than a strict minor harmony , but on a - quite Greek - minor major, with the brass dominating, shouting how much more explosively expanded this film will be compared to the previous one. Continuous cosmopolitan changes of rhythm and rhythmic patterns - characteristic of Eastern/Greek traditional music - with a short break to bring back to the fore motifs of the first film through subtle - and mysterious - woodwinds (something subtly present in the background in each forte of the theme), before the next and final blast of radiation, which the horns take off, in an interesting harmony, concealing for one last but bronzed time in this brilliant blast, the connecting link between New England and Argosaronic, the motif of the mystery .
As the theme of the first film is knives coming out of their sheaths, so the theme of the second is a glass onion, with a thousand layers and the mystery hiding in plain sight.
Knives Out! (String Quartet in G Minor)
Theme From Glass Onion
