The Revenant

Director: Alejandro Iñárritu

2015 / 156min / DCP

Electronic experimentalist Sakamoto may have seemed an unusual choice to score a Western set on the 1820s frontier, but Iñárritu’s choice to have him do so paid off dividends. Triumphantly returning to film composition after treatment for throat cancer, Sakamoto, in collaboration with Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner of The National, created a grandly glacial soundscape to accompany Leonardo DiCaprio’s gravely wounded fur trapper Hugh Glass on his agonizing, hallucinatory mission of vengeance, towards a climactic confrontation with rival Tom Hardy that unleashes a terrible, glorious burst of aural violence.