Unlike the Silva Screen CD, which presents a different collection of cues in their Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy anthology, this one-film album emphasizes Jacob Groth’s atmospheric orchestral cues, with just a handful of electronic fusion cuts in the album’s second half.

Groth’s approach to Larsson’s grim, cruel film is a sparse, slowly evolving score. “Warning Cry,” for example, maps out the brief 6-note theme, and its constant iteration evolves to a rumbling orchestral march – only to recede into the black silence from whence it emerged.

“Evil Men” is an interesting cue for the way Groth focuses on repercussions, aftermath, and emotional affects of a victim’s trauma. The cue’s based around 3 notes from the main theme, with strings giving the variation tenderness, and little ripples of warm tones. Groth adds more orchestral elements during the cue’s progression, eventually culminating in a percussive march dominated by brass and snare drum.

In “For Harriet,” Groth writes a moving tribute to a murder victim, and his theme evokes a classical Hollywood love theme, with slowly drawn tones that form a light, neo-Biblical lament. “Secrets” introduces the score’s second theme, played as a delicate lament on solo oboe, under which Groth keeps playing with a meandering swirls of low tones on strings.

A scattered pattern of electronic notes give “Mother and Daughter” a lovely tenderness, while grinding bass lines and breathy exhalations introduce a gloomy, persuasive force. In the film, the cue underscores Lisbeth Salander’s meeting with her emotionally numb mother in a hospital, and the low tones capture the sense of destiny that ultimately pulls Salander away from her mother, and mandates her return to the murder case, and all of its dismal, sadistic elements.

Electronics are more dominant in the propulsive “Moving,” with pulses and drum hits pitted against a swirling theme variation; there’s slight synth ornamentation on the otherwise orchestral-heavy action cue “Heavy Burden”; the orchestral-synth hybrid song “Would Anybody Die for Me?”; and the film’s pulsing “Endings” cue for the end credit crawl.

Milan’s CD is a satisfying presentation of Groth’s generally sparse score. Hopefully the label will release similar full-score albums for the remaining chapters in Larsson’s trilogy – The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

© 2010 Mark R. Hasan