Gone Girl OST

"What Have We Done to Each Other?" opens the Gone Girl film soundtrack in the same way that the above passage, taken from page one of Flynn's bestselling novel, lures readers into the tangled web of married couple Nick and Amy Dunne: On a note of disquiet. Beautiful, ethereal, unnerving, the reverberant siren calls elicit a spine-shiver of detachment - How well can one know another person, especially the person that they love? - but also a dreamy, unearthly remove, a feeling that so often comes with drifting away from reality and back into the recesses of the mind. The call and response sounds are evocative of lights bobbing in separate orbits; ghosts passing each other in the night; a body floating Ophelia-like in the water for a stranger to find. And that's just the beginning.

Trent Reznor is no stranger to darkness. Besides fronting the heavy metal band Nine Inch Nails for more than a quarter century (yep, 26 years), Reznor and frequent collaborator Atticus Ross have teamed up with Gone Girl director David Fincher on two previous films - 2010's the Social Network and 2011's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - that also relied heavily on moody, well-crafted soundscapes. The former film, which won Reznor and Ross an Academy Award for Best Original Score, has an urgent, post-industrial anxiety running over its dark, slow burn of bass tones and digital blips; the latter, which won a Grammy for Best Score for Visual Media, is less insular and more aggressive, raw, agitated. Their Gone Girl soundtrack, which includes 24 tracks and spans almost one and a half hours, falls somewhere in between the two: still creeping with paranoia, but more subtly so.