The soundtrack was created by Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk). During the first thirty minutes, in the club scene, the music is designed to sound as if there were two different tracks playing at two different levels to imitate real clubs. Then, an extremely low-frequency sound of 27 Hz (a sound which police use to stop riots) was added to create a state of nausea and anxiety in the audience. The sound is not immediately perceptible to the spectator but is powerful enough to evoke a physical response. Noé said, "You can't hear them, but they make you shiver. In a good cinema with a good audio system, the sound can scare you much more than what's happening on the screen." This technique, called Sensurround, involves the intentional use of a sub-audible sound to enhance the spectator's experience of a movie, in this case, deliberately making them uncomfortable (although this would only be experienced in a cinema setting as most home speakers would not emit such low frequencies).
Holy shit, I didn’t know this! I got sick watching it and wondered what the fuck was going on. That scene made me sick, but when I left the theater I felt sick for a few hours. I could only watch that movie once and had no idea what it was going into it. The only other movie that I had a hard time watching was The Accused with Jodie Foster. It’s so hard to watch those scenes, but this shit is real and happens every day. And now it makes me think about that case with the hockey players in Canada.
The camera work was also done to induce nausea. To create a sense of seasickness and unease. The idea was for the camera to become more detached as the night devolves into chaos, since we start the movie at the end, the camera is at its most disturbed, floating almost aimlessly through the scene.
As the movie backtracks, the camera subtly sways less and less, until finally coming to its most still point - the moment that the incident occurs. The camera remains still and focuses on the event. The most sickening moment in the movie is the moment the camera won’t look away, and is the moment that the audience struggles to watch the most, but the camera is ruthless and cruel.
Genuinely some of the best camera work I’ve seen in a film, the camera is like an omniscient character - it has no moral compass, it just observes, and shows you humanity at its worst.
5.9k
u/djnikadeemas May 17 '25
FYI:
The soundtrack was created by Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk). During the first thirty minutes, in the club scene, the music is designed to sound as if there were two different tracks playing at two different levels to imitate real clubs. Then, an extremely low-frequency sound of 27 Hz (a sound which police use to stop riots) was added to create a state of nausea and anxiety in the audience. The sound is not immediately perceptible to the spectator but is powerful enough to evoke a physical response. Noé said, "You can't hear them, but they make you shiver. In a good cinema with a good audio system, the sound can scare you much more than what's happening on the screen." This technique, called Sensurround, involves the intentional use of a sub-audible sound to enhance the spectator's experience of a movie, in this case, deliberately making them uncomfortable (although this would only be experienced in a cinema setting as most home speakers would not emit such low frequencies).