There is a tremendous amount of dread steeped through Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. With its dark palette, isolated location and the cold shoulders given from its ensemble, Johnson takes his Benoit Blanc series into more meaningful and rich territory. Unscoring all of it is Nathan Johnson’s riveting score. This is a mystery about what we believe in our bones and how we will go to alarming lengths to get the things we want. Nathan Johnson’s music is intimate like a prayer but feels grand and holy like a dedicated, boistrous sermon.
Music is baked into the notion of worship. I am not a church-going fellow, but a lot of people look forward to their weekly services just to feel lifted by music or the opportunity to feel the spirit move them. Johnson explains that he purposely stayed away from creating a score too soaked in literal church music. Wake Up Dead Man features a battle for the souls of the congregants of Chimney Rock’s most exclusive inner circle.
“Rian and I both grew up in the church, so that is very much part of our background and something we are familiar with,” Johnson admits. “We talked about it a little bit right at the start, but I think we decided to let any church music be only when you see someone playing the organ. Let’s not do a whole organ score. I think the interesting thing for me is that Rian was talking about Moby Dick with us. He spoke about Ahab ranting against the waves with this feeling of dread under the surface–this idea of a Leviathan. We quickly pivoted away from chuch music as a conceptual idea for the score. It was more about underscoring that dread.
The first thing you hear in the movie is the sound of all the strings scraping their bows against the strings. It’s like nails on a chalkboard with this really uncomfortable, ugly sound, and then it resolves into a sing pure tone. That is the main motif that happens all throughout the movie. It’s like a tug of war being the ugliness and beauty or between darkness and light. In my view, I feel like that is what the movie is about, that elemental tug of war.”
Glenn Close’s Martha reveals to Josh O’Connor’s Jud the story about Monsignor Wicks’ mother, Grace, and how her greed led her to hunt for a coveted inheritance. It’s a thread that continues throughout the third entry into the Beniot Blanc series, but there is something desirable in the music of “Eve’s Apple” that underscores this cue. The notes sound like they are glistening and almost childlike before something more chaotc and unpredictable sets in.
“This is the one moment where we want to feel a little bit of that fairy tale element before it goes away once we get into the story,” he says. “As our main character, Jud, is getting to the town of Chimney Rock, he’s getting his first glimpse into the church, and it feels like this glimmering, glistening, come-into-the-woods, let me tell you a story quality. It’s the first time that Jud learns of the underbelly of this small town, and it’s this conceptual idea of the nature of sin and temptation. I found it interesting that you hear these Biblical things like the money is the root of all evil or power corrupts but I like to think that things like money and power are more agnostic. It depends on whose hands they’re in. We begin the movie hearing one version of “Eve’s Apple” but then it takes on different meanings by the end of the film.”
Johnson, who has scored all three Benoit Blanc films, creates a tumbling introduction to our list of prime suspects. We move from one person to the next before we descend into something that feels more uneasy with the introduction to Josh Brolin’s character in the cue titled “Father Wicks.” The uncertainty of that unease is the most troubling part. With a man of the cloth, why do we feel like something is being unglued? Or taken apart? Johnson’s music here really reinforces the notion of nefarious duality.
“With the Monsignor Wocks cue, I am doing a weird musical thing called a metric modulation where half the orchestrsa is playing in one time signature and one tempo, and the other half of the orchestra is playing in an entire different one,” Johnson says. “What you’re hearing is really unsettling polyrhythms. I started developing this concept, this rhythmic opposition, that felt like when people in power are telling you think that you know are not true. It speaks to this hypocrisy and doublespeak of people in power. It’s a really unsettling thing to be in an environment like that where everything is controlled by the person in power.”
That unease is amplified later on in the film with the track titled, “Torching the Flock” when one character makes their plans known. There is a confidence to how this theme unravels with assured precision. Johnson reveals how he used the harp in an entirely new way to our ears. We normally think the harp as angelic and light, but he changes it to sound animalistic and rough. He played with tempo and broken instruments.
“”The Flock” sets up this harp vibe, and then “Torching of the Flock” is hard, but it’s the lowest note being plucked over and over again,” he says. “When you play that low on the harp, it sounds a bit like a growl, and I also recorded a broken harmonium which creaks because it’s a rusty bellows instrument. I recorded that and then slowed it way down, and this goes back to an idea of Wicks as he shouts against the waves. When you slow that down what you essentially hear is timbers creaking as if it’s [the sound of] ropes pulling across a ship.
Something is going on under there. “Torching the Flock” is a cue that is essentially the low string of a harp–incessant, very slow, very quiet–but combined with this really warped, slowed-down version of this broken instrument supporting it underneath. I love the idea of taking an orchestra and playing things in ways that we aren’t used to. Another element is that we found this stone cathedral in London and set up this crazy, atmospheric recording set-up where I got six bass clarinetists to come in. Rather than blow into it, though, I just used the key clacks, which creates this cascading, scattering, clickety clack. That’s one of the main rhythmic elements that you hear throughout the score. Instead of a sharp snare drum, there is a bit of chaos on every beat.”
Through the dread is hope. O’Connor’s Jud tells someone early in the film, ‘I want to be a good priest,’ and his performance anchors us into the drama in such an unexpected, gentle way. In order to honor Jud’s conscious goodness, Johnson scored the track ‘Jud’s Prayer’ with a natural curiosity that also acknowledges the darker deeds around him. Maybe the clarinet brings that out, but we feel that he is not naive but intelligent.
“Father Jud is one of the most generous characters that I’ve seen in film recently and definitely in Rian’s filmography,” he says. “I like this idea of generosity and humility, and some people, for some reason, assign weakness to that where I find it to be very powerful. Wicks is trying to control while Jud is trying to serve. His motif appears as “Jud’s Prayer” but I am not only tying it to him, and the way I thought that was the idea of revelation. We hear that come back for a few different characters in different moments in the film where they might be having a touch of the divine, so to speak. There’s a lot happening visually in the movie with lighting and how it changes from lightness to darkness. When the chaos of the world stops and we get rid of those conflicting rhythms at odds with each other, we have softer, generous moments.”
At the end of every great mystery, we get a cofrontation or confession of murderous misdeeds. In the aptly titled track, “The Confession,” Johnson layers the finale with strings and piano, as if every key stroked or string plunked is another twist in the story. At over eight minutes long, it’s a momentous piece of music.
“That was the piece that was hanging over my head the entire time I was composing the score,” he says. “The way that these films are structured, we know we’re going to have about a ten minute chunk right at the end where everything is laid out, and I spent about two weeks just on that piece of music. What makes it difficult is that the storytelling is shifting gears every minute to a minute and a half–sometimes quicker than that. This piece has to simultaneously slam on the brakes, push on the gas, make a hard left turn, and then look in the rearview mirror. It does feel like a rollercoaster ride for me, but it’s an invitation to tap into the purest way to dance with the film. I wanted to be as nimble as possible. I get to pirouette around the main characters as they’re shining their own light and insight on the last two hours of the movie. I had all the ingredients to the pie of the story, so to speak, and it has to serve to many different purposes. It has to have this inevitability.”
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery debuts exclusively on Netflix on December 12. Johnson’s score will also be available to stream on the same day.
