Movie reviews

Ravenous: the music has a worrying appetite

Antonia Bird's cannibal horror-western gives its violence a troublesome musical energy. The score makes a stronger argument for the film's oddness than its opening joke.

Whimsical Woes editorial ·

Ravenous introduces itself with Nietzsche and an unattributed invitation to 'Eat Me.' It is quite a way to announce that a film has thoughts about human behavior and would also like to be a horrible little joke. The opening is less interesting than the problem it raises: can a horror film make violence energetic, even amusing, while keeping its moral consequences in view? Antonia Bird's 1999 film makes its best attempt through music.

Guy Pearce plays John Boyd, a soldier sent to an isolated outpost in the Sierra Nevada. Robert Carlyle's Colqhoun arrives with a story of starvation and cannibalism. The military setting is useful before the supernatural machinery starts doing much work. A fort has orders, ranks, duties, and an official way of explaining why some people should expose themselves to danger for others. Appetite finds an organization ready to accommodate it.

The opening joke gives too much permission

Screenwriter Ted Griffin has described his dislike of those introductory quotations. There is a strong case against them: the cheeky invitation arrives before the film has earned an uneasy laugh. It labels the experience in advance, as though viewers need an instruction card for an odd mixture of tones. The more effective approach is to let an audience discover that its responses have become uncomfortable.

Let the instruments pick a fight

The score by Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman gives that discomfort room to develop. Its instrumentation includes accordion, banjo, harp, and flute, a selection with a much wider range of associations than an uninterrupted blanket of ominous strings. Plucked and reedy sounds can suggest bustle, folk entertainment, or awkward ceremony. Placing those possibilities inside a cannibal story makes the musical world feel capable of enjoying something the viewer would rather reject.

That is the film's most useful tonal idea. Pleasure becomes suspect without disappearing. A conventional warning score could keep the audience comfortably opposed to the violence, identifying the terrible thing before it happened. Ravenous gives horror several emotional registers to move through. The resulting energy belongs to a world where appetite can pass for enthusiasm, opportunity, or a practical answer to a difficult situation.

There is a cost. Tonal variety can feel arbitrary when the viewer cannot locate a stable emotional position. Someone wanting sustained dread may hear the comic energy as interference; someone expecting a broadly playful horror-comedy may find the bodily violence too punishing. The mismatch is the attraction, but it does not become successful for every viewer merely because it is unusual.

What the appetite costs

Bird later described Ravenous as her most political film and connected it to questions of human value. That reading fits the military setting particularly well. Turning a person into something useful to another body is an extreme version of treating people as resources. The frontier setting gives that transaction space to become a model of expansion: somebody's improvement has somebody else's body underneath it. This is an interpretation of the fiction, not a historical account of a particular expedition.

Choose Ravenous when you want a horror-western that risks sounding wrong for its own violence. For an artist, the lesson is in counterpoint: the sound accompanying a disturbing image can give it an uncomfortable attraction instead of simply identifying its mood. The film is strongest when it trusts that friction. A banjo can leave a more troublesome question than an opening card announcing that everyone is allowed to laugh.

Questions from the crypt

Is Ravenous (1999) a horror film or a comedy?

It mixes cannibal horror, western adventure, and black comedy. The humorous tone does not remove the graphic bodily violence, so it suits viewers comfortable with both rather than anyone seeking a gentle parody.

Who composed the Ravenous soundtrack, and did they write it together?

Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman share the score credit. In a 2000 interview, Nyman explained that they largely composed their contributions separately, then worked with a team to assemble the soundtrack. Joint credit should not be mistaken for writing every cue together.

Should Ravenous be treated as a true historical account?

No. It is a fictional horror-western with supernatural elements. Its historical setting and its writer's sources of inspiration do not make its characters or events documentary evidence.

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