• Composed by Stephen Warbeck
• MovieScore Media / 2015 / 24m

An odd-sounding French movie, Je Te Survivrai (also known as I’ll Bury You) is about an estate agent who plans to get a house off an old lady by cutting off her water supply.  Unfortunately for him, while doing so he ends up stuck down a well and can’t get out, and so launches into an introspective consideration of his life.  Ah, the French…  The score is by a British composer, Stephen Warbeck, best-known for his romantic and lush scores (and Oscar-winner for Shakespeare in Love) but this is one of the most genuinely unorthodox film scores I’ve heard in quite some time.  The press release describes it as “an eclectic mixture of Western-flavored twang, laid back jazz and contemporary Euro-thriller scoring” which sounds rather unlikely but is in fact entirely the case, a group of disparate elements thrown together into a package that somehow just works.

I love the entirely off-the-wall suspense music with country guitar mixing with small orchestra and keyboards, introduced right at the start in “The Angry Neighbour” and perhaps best heard in “The Depths”, which even has a slightly macabre comic touch to it with the pizzicato strings.  The latter also has a lovely touch of emotion in it.  “In the Well” is a much darker piece, desolate even.  “Water” is the main action cue, modern and exciting and unusual for this score in being rather orthodox.  The jazz comes from a trio of cues, all lovely, the witty and wry “The Perfect House” the pick.  It’s a short album and a very eclectic one, in fact it’s a bizarre amalgamation of styles, but it’s certainly entertaining and a very different side of Stephen Warbeck from anything I’ve heard before.

Rating: ***

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