Following its recent nominations for Best Original Score for The Golden Globes and Best Score for the Critics’ Choice Awards, Mercury Classics Soundtrack & Score release Hildur Guðnadóttir’s brooding original motion picture soundtrack for Women Talking, the poignant film based on Miriam Toews 2018 novel of the same name. Written and directed by Sarah Polley, the film is released in UK cinemas from February 10, 2023.
Women Talking is a highly emotive and inspiring story, based on the best-selling novel by Miriam Toews that follows a group of women from an isolated religious community who grapple with reconciling their reality with their faith.
Hildur Guðnadóttir’s affecting, ruminative score captures the film’s emotional complexity. Rousing guitar-led motifs underpin the folk-influenced score, punctuated by unsettling percussion and mournful strings.
Of the soundtrack, Hildur Guðnadóttir explains “Women Talking tells a story inspired by true events. While the story is both doomsday and a call to prayer, the music needed to be a vehicle for hope – a way forward from a situation that is unbearably dark. It was a very interesting process for me to go through because I inevitably had to put it in context with the big forward and backwards movements that women have been experiencing. Instead of allowing myself to be paralyzed with anger, I felt the way forward was to lean into friendship and connection, as we experience in the film.”
Dubbed by The Guardian as ‘one of the most sought-after film composers’, Hildur Guðnadóttir’s impressive composition credits include the psychological thriller Joker, for which she received an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA for Best Original Score (with Guðnadóttir making history as the first solo women to win in this BAFTA category), and the HBO series Chernobyl, for which she took home the Primetime Emmy Award and a BAFTA. For both projects she also received Grammy Awards for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
Staring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand, Women Talking is produced by Orion Pictures, Plan B Entertainment and Hear/Say Productions.
Women Talking includes the following tracks:
“Work of Ghosts”
“Speak Up”
“Doomsday”
“Not All Men”
“Pros and Cons”
“Always”
“I Saw Him”
“He’s Here”
“Teeth”
“Peace of God”
“Jumping”
“Boys”
“Nettie”
“Leaving”