• Composed by Carlos José Alvarez
• MovieScore Media MMS10014 / 2010 / 47:24

Brittany Murphy’s final film, Deadline is a fairly humdrum chiller about a screenwriter who goes off to an enormous house to finish off her screenplay and discovers a load of videos about the previous inhabitants.  Strangely, for a horror film, there is almost nothing even remotely scary about it until the last five minutes or so – making the film very reliant on its music.  The score, by Carlos José Alvarez, is by a considerable distance the film’s greatest asset.  Classy and elegant, it mixes an eerie beauty in with more overt chills and is the finest score I’ve heard for a film like this in a long time.  The main titles sequence allows Alvarez to introduce his long-lined string theme and it’s a real treat.

The album features many equally absorbing moments of melodic beauty (nicely summed-up in a six-minute suite which closes it); sometimes the composer has to take on the responsibility of creating the chills in the film too and he handles those duties capably.  Perhaps the highlight is “The Drowning”, which runs through a gamut of emotion including some brassy, more traditional “horror music” – beautifully-composed, dramatically potent.  Indeed, it isn’t just the case that this is very impressive music to listen to on this album – it’s incredibly effective in the film too.  This is the first major project scored by Alvarez and on this evidence there should be many more to come.  He seems to have a considerable gift and I greatly look forward to hearing more music from him in future.  This album is one of the year’s most impressive to date.  ****

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