BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Yes.
Jane Campion has a long history of getting the best out of world-class composers like Michael Nyman and Mark Bradshaw, and she does so again in her dagger-like frontier drama by encouraging Radiohead multi-instrumentalist (and virtuosic film composer) Jonny Greenwood to create his own musical syntax of menace — seductive but threatening.
The work that resulted from that free rein falls somewhere between “Phantom Thread” and “There Will Be Blood,” combining repressed French horns, a mechanically detuned piano that plays along with Kirsten Dunst’s performance in broken time, and a cello masquerading as a banjo in order to sew together a Western soundscape that’s constricting tighter in the middle while fraying along the edges. And then, in the transcendent “Psalm 22,” that tension resolves into a new and delightfully violent lightness that lingers under the skin long after the movie is over. This is an inventive and grippingly atonal score from start to finish, and it’s impossible to think of Campion’s film without hearing Greenwood’s strings pluck away inside your head. Even in such a competitive field, this score stands far above the fray.