In 2019, cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir won an Oscar and a Grammy for her soundtrack work on the film Joker. Director Todd Philips believes the music is the “second biggest character” in this film. Now they collaborated again, on the sequel Joker: Folie à Deux starring Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix.
It’s easy to imagine Guðnadóttir as a gloomy person. Which might not be true at all, but the Icelandic composer and cellist rose to fame through her work on predominantly dark movies and television series, and her award-winning film music often sounds like an eerie, threatening hum.
The main characters in those movies tend to be slightly unpleasant – just take the Joker, the mentally ill supervillain from the Batman comic series, or the overambitious and abusive classical conductor Lydia Tár. Both are not deeply evil, but they’re not exactly classic movie heroes either. They’re complex human beings, just like ourselves.
One of the secrets to Guðnadóttir’s massive success is that her music never tells the audience how to feel.
Film music often dramatically underscores the plot events – an upbeat funk groove might illustrate a car chase, and lush strings will underscore a romantic scene. Guðnadóttir does away with that kind of on-the-nose obviousness. She takes her audience seriously.
Her music doesn’t mirror feelings, neither those of the protagonists nor those of the watcher. Instead, it lets questions arise, like: Do you notice what this person is doing? Well, how are you feeling about this?
For her work, which fits the more ambivalent pictures and series of the post-Netflix age, Guðnadóttir has earned several awards, including two Grammys.
Born in Reykjavik, she grew up in a musical family, part of the small but well-connected artistic community of Iceland’s capital. (This might sound like a clichéd joke, but her father actually lives in the same street as Björk.)
Classically trained as a cellist in Reykjavik and Berlin, the young musician immersed herself in the Icelandic underground of the 2000s, appearing on records by producer Ben Frost, the experimental group Múm, and her close friend, the composer Jóhan Jóhannsson, with whom she founded and ran the label and artist collective Kitchen Motors.
After a few folk-inspired solo albums that she recorded between New York, Berlin and Reykjavik, she focussed on film soundtracks in the 2010s. In 2015, she started co-writing the music for the popular Icelandic crime series Trapped in collaboration with Jóhann Jóhannsson and Rutger Hoedemaekers. The third season ran on Netflix under the international title Entrapped.
Over the following years, she scored a wide range of movies, ranging from the biblical drama Maria Magdalene to the drug cartel thriller Sicario: Day of the Soldado.
In 2019, Guðnadóttir landed two massive hits with the soundtrack for the HBO mini-series Chernobyl, for which she received a Grammy, and the layered orchestral score for the DC Comics adaptation Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix, for which she received ten international awards, including an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy.
This success led her to more commissioned work. She received loads of accolades for her soundtrack of the critically acclaimed Tár, Todd Field’s 2022 movie about female director Lydia Tár, portrayed by Cate Blanchett. In the same year, she wrote and produced the score for “Women Talking”, a drama about women's rights and abuse in a mennonite community.
Guðnadóttir’s work is mainly about creating space. Writing for a sophisticated audience, she picks scripts that are built on interesting, multi-faceted characters. Building on dark and gloomy drones that tend to create a unique, ambiguous atmosphere, the Icelandic composer has clearly found her very own niche. Directors and cineasts are at her feet.
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