The Others: Original Motion Picture Score
For his English-language filmmaking debut, Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar found himself dealing not only with the dissolving marriage of his megawatt-star/producer team (Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise), but his own multihyphenate ambitions on the project. As he did forThesisandOpen Your Eyes, Amenábar not only wrote and directed, but composed the film score as well, joining a very select company of director-composers that countsJohn CarpenterandMike Figgisin its ranks. But with this accomplished orchestral score, the young Spaniard may well have leapfrogged into the first tier of film composers, period. Claiming his inspiration from a childhood spent listening to film soundtracks and emulating what he'd learned as a boy, Amenábar has produced a rich, dynamic work that trades on influences from delicate French impressionism to shrill, late-20th-century modernism. Given the film's horror-genre concerns, there is a certain bowing to occasionally jolting sonic clichés, but it's the compelling way the director-composer sets them up that imparts a sense of distinct originality to his score as a whole. Amenábar is unafraid to let his longing string passages and percussive flourishes sometimes hang hauntingly for an extra bar or two, milking as much emotional resonance from the effectively eerie spaces between the notes.--Jerry McCulley