Terrific movie, terrible soundtrack

Rating: 8/10 (8 December 2018)

Great movie! REALLY annoying soundtrack. Imagine this: you have a stringed instrument-- maybe a violin, maybe a cello, and you have a bow. You scrape the bow across a string, producing a short sound like a quarter-note, then you pluck that string with your fingers. The result is a a sort of a brief hoo-hah sound. Now repeat that for what seems like 20 minutes. And make it REALLY loud. Hoo-ha, hoo-hah, hoo-hah. After the first 10 minutes, I'm no longer suspending disbelief: I no longer feel like I'm in 18th century England. I'm sitting in a movie theater being annoyed by this loud noise from the speakers. After a few more minutes I start to wonder: is this actually the soundtrack, or did the fire alarm go off? I look around the auditorium to see an audience of people who are also looking around the auditorium to see if they're the only ones in extreme discomfort. Eventually the hoo-hahs stop, but they pick up again briefly later in the film, once again pulling you out of the queen's bedchambers and dumping you into a theater seat. One of the lines in the film refers to "five of the birch," meaning that the character is about to be whipped with a cane. I wouldn't want to do that to this film's soundtrack composer or musical director.
But I would pay to watch it.