I still remember some of my earliest movie experiences as a little kid, the ones that really amazed me and stayed with me throughout the years.

I grew up with Star Wars and Spielberg’s adventure movies—movies that made you dream. The sensation of getting really close to a character on screen, seeing what they see, feeling what they feel, always fascinated me. With time, I realized that a lot of that had to do with the music.

Music in film has the power to let us read between the lines, to get under our skin, and to understand things where words fail. It’s an incredible tool for storytelling, and it can help us look deep inside the mind of a character.

When I was tasked with composing the score for the psychological thriller Slingshot, it became clear that I’d have to take this concept one step further: to get deep inside a mind that is falling apart.

In Slingshot, we follow John (Casey Affleck), one of three astronauts aboard a mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan. The journey takes years, and in this isolation, John is slowly losing his grip on reality, increasingly unsure of what’s real and what’s just in his head.

To approach this musically, I wanted to find ways to make John’s mental state audible. I started working with different melodic fragments and patterns, and synths to create a sense of recognizable movement. This is a common concept in film scoring, but it becomes more interesting when these patterns start to shift or overlap with one another, resulting in a sort of contained chaos. In particular scenes during the movie, when John makes a big discovery or decision, I may have three or more different arpeggio patterns overlap and rub against each other.

Next to strings and synths, I’m also using pianos and other organic sounds, which get further processed and manipulated, so they begin to warp and deteriorate depending on the scene, enabling me to go very dark and weird in certain places.

There’s a constant struggle between control and escalation in John’s mind, so it only made sense to me to start with simple musical concepts that I could then mangle and push to extremes. It’s very much a hybrid score, combining orchestra and acoustic instruments with a lot of musical sound design. That space where organic and electronic sounds blend into one, and you can’t tell what’s what is always fascinating to me

Another part of the film are flashbacks that take us back to John’s time on earth and Zoe, a woman he left behind. For Zoe, I’m using flourishes of solo violin, beautifully performed by violinist and composer Natalia Tsupryk. These flourishes come and go in waves, like the flickering memories living in John’s mind. His thoughts about Zoe are filled with regret, wondering what could have been if he’d stayed. So, for the music, it’s a balancing act: Connecting the then and now, the real and the imaginary, and really trying to get into the head of the main character. There’s growing tension between John and his team members onboard. There are twists and turns in the story, there’s psychological and physical horror, there’s drama and moments of romance through the flashbacks, so musically, I get to tick a lot of boxes, which is always a challenge, but also great fun.

With the main theme of the score, I wanted to capture both the larger-than-life meaning of this mission to Titan, the commitment it takes, as well as John’s sense of loneliness, isolation and longing. I like using the orchestra to give us a sense of scale and emotional weight in this case.

It begins with a pensive, slightly disorienting violin pattern, until piano chords ground the piece, leading us into the main theme, played by the celli. The arrangement around this theme keeps growing, cycle after cycle, with interlocking synths, more strings, and brass pushing us forward until we suddenly stop. Several overlapping strings and synth arpeggios take over, creating a sense of chaos and disorientation.

This momentum is looking for an outlet, which eventually comes in the form of big string and brass chords building up to an inevitable conclusion. This is John at the end of the story, having to make a decision that might change everything, and he’s ready to take that step.

I hope the main theme and the rest of the score will help audiences connect with John on a deeper emotional level and maybe let them get lost in space a little when listening on its own.

Working on Slingshot was an immensely satisfying process, not only as a canvas for different ideas I wanted to explore but also thanks to the trust and seamless, open collaboration with director Mikael Håfström, editor Rickard Krantz and score producer Lorne Balfe.

By Steffen Thum for No Film School

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