Canadian Psycho

Although moving pictures had been around since the 19th Century, sound did not accompany them until the late 1920s. Today, we expect a movie to be a full audio-visual experience. The soundtrack can decide the effectiveness of a scene; good choices can amplify the emotions of the moment, whereas bad ones just seem silly. It was in keeping this in mind that, in The Hours, I was seriously surprised by the soundtrack as Laura's story carries out. It felt like at any moment, the film was going to turn psycho. Was she going to stab somebody trying to make the cake? Was she going to crash the car? The music keeps the tension high with all of her scenes.

In fact, all of her scenes' music reminded me of this scene in Kill Bill:

Here, we have a lady with an eye patch whistling as she walks into a hospital. As she enters the restroom, the music starts to pick up behind her. As she gets dressed, the music becomes more intense. As she fills a syringe with a strange red substance, the horns blast. She walks out of the restroom, now donning a stereotypical nurses' outfit, no longer whistling, but the music plays on. A storm is brewing outdoors, as she looks in on some patient's room. Thanks to the music, we know she is no ordinary nurse. Despite the facade (and eerie red cross eye patch) she wears, she is actually there to do something very sinister. Of course, it is revealed she is there to assassinate the patient who she used to work with, but that is irrelevant. The music sets up the scene perfectly; something is amiss with eye patch lady.

As we watch through The Hours, we can see what the dramatic music is building towards. Instead of some freaky moment where Laura murders her husband or harms Richard or anything, she is progressing towards the point where she tries to kill herself. But, the intense music follows her even after she doesn't go through with it. When she returns to talk with Clarissa about Richard's death, the music returns as she gives her monologue about why she left. Even though she had acted out the craziness all that time ago, she had never fully escaped it, signified by the way everything seemed just... off about her, in both her first and last scenes. Behind her facade of an ordinary housewife lives a deeply unhappy woman, and our main clue is the music behind it. Sound raises powerful emotions, and the music in The Hours suitably piqued mine in severely bizarre ways.