Spiderhead was scored in the space between pleasure and control

The first needle drop in Spiderhead is “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals, and it plays over a scene in which a prisoner is being injected with a drug that will make him feel euphoric. The song is bright, propulsive, joyful in the uncomplicated way that late-1980s pop was joyful, engineered to make a body move. The prisoner’s body does move. He laughs. He dances. The drug is working. The warden, Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth), watches with the satisfied attention of a man who has designed this moment, who has selected this song, who understands that the pleasure the prisoner feels is a product he has manufactured and a lever he can pull.

Then the song ends and the original score enters, and the score sounds nothing like the song. It is low, textural, built from sustained synthesiser tones and processed strings that sit in the lower registers like something settling at the bottom of a tank. The transition from pop to score is the transition from the prisoner’s experience to the institution’s architecture, from how it feels to be inside the experiment to what the experiment looks like from the control room. The two musics do not agree with each other. They are not meant to.

This split is the organising principle of Spiderhead’s soundtrack, and it mirrors the organising principle of the film itself.

The pharmaceutical jukebox

Joseph Kosinski’s film, based on a George Saunders short story and shot in Queensland, takes place in a minimum-security prison where inmates volunteer for pharmaceutical trials in exchange for comfortable living conditions. The drugs being tested manipulate emotions: one induces love, one induces laughter, one induces existential dread. Abnesti administers them with the genial efficiency of a man who believes he is doing good work, and the needle drops are his tool of environmental design. He plays Hall & Oates. He plays Supertramp. He plays the kind of music that belongs to a barbecue or a road trip, music that signals leisure and pleasure and the absence of threat.

The needle drops are diegetic, or at least they occupy the ambiguous space between diegetic and non-diegetic that Kosinski uses throughout. Abnesti appears to be playing the music. The speakers are visible. The sound has the quality of a room rather than a soundtrack. But the songs are also doing the work of a conventional score: they are telling the audience what to feel, or rather, they are telling the audience what the prisoners are being made to feel, and the distinction between those two things is the film’s central ethical question.

Because the songs are instruments of control. They are part of the dosage. Abnesti selects them the way he selects the chemicals, calibrating input to produce a desired emotional output. The warmth of “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins is not incidental. It is pharmaceutical. And when you hear it in the context of the film, the warmth turns strange, becomes a texture you cannot trust, a pleasure that has been administered rather than experienced.

The score as surveillance

The original score, composed by Joseph Trapanese, works in the opposite register. Where the needle drops are warm, bright, and temporally located in a specific era of pop music, the score is cold, ambient, and temporally unmoored. It sounds like the architecture of the facility itself: clean surfaces, controlled temperatures, fluorescent light rendered as sound. The synthesiser pads do not pulse or build. They sustain. They hold a single harmonic state for long enough that the ear stops registering them as music and starts registering them as environment, the hum of a building that is always watching.

Trapanese uses this sustained quality to score the surveillance apparatus. The cameras, the one-way glass, the data readouts, the clinical observation of human subjects by other humans who have decided that observation is a form of care. The score is the sound of the institution thinking. It does not react to what the prisoners feel. It monitors what the prisoners feel, and the difference between reacting and monitoring is the difference between empathy and data collection.

The most effective cues are the ones that sit beneath the needle drops, barely audible, a low drone under the brightness of the pop songs. You feel them more than you hear them. They introduce a dissonance that the pop music alone would not produce, a sense that the pleasure on the surface is supported by something mechanical and purposeful underneath. The pharmaceutical joy is real, the drug does what Abnesti says it does, but the score reminds you that real is not the same as free.

Queensland as nowhere

The film was shot at the Whitsundays, and the location is beautiful in a way that functions as another form of control. The prison does not look like a prison. It looks like a resort. The ocean is visible from the windows. The light is golden. The architecture is open, modern, designed to make the inmates forget, or at least stop noticing, that they cannot leave. The landscape is complicit in the experiment, offering a visual pleasure that parallels the chemical pleasure, and the score acknowledges this by refusing to score the landscape as landscape. There are no cues that respond to the beauty of the setting. The ocean, the sky, the tropical greenery exist in the film’s visual register but not in its musical one. The score treats the environment as a surface, a projection, a designed experience rather than a natural one.

This is an interesting use of an Australian location. Queensland, in Australian cinema, tends to be scored as heat, as wildness, as a place where the rules of southern urban life do not apply. Kosinski and Trapanese score it as containment. The beauty is the cage. The warmth is the drug. The landscape is not a place you are free to inhabit but a view you are permitted to see from a window that does not open.

Consent and the soundtrack

The film’s central question is about consent, about whether pleasure that is chemically induced can be meaningfully chosen, about whether a prisoner who volunteers for a drug trial is exercising agency or performing a version of agency that the institution has scripted for them. The soundtrack stages this question musically. The needle drops are pleasurable. They are designed to be pleasurable. When “I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner plays over a scene of chemically induced romantic feeling, the audience is caught in the same trap as the prisoner: the song is good, the feeling is real, and the fact that both have been selected by someone with an agenda does not make them less effective. The pleasure is genuine and the pleasure is manufactured and both of those things are true at the same time.

The score does not resolve this tension. It sits beneath it, sustaining, monitoring, recording. The final act, when the needle drops stop and the score takes over entirely, is the moment when the pleasure apparatus is switched off and what remains is the hum of the institution, the sound of control without its decorative surface, and the silence where the music used to be is the closest the film comes to an image of freedom. Not the presence of something good but the absence of something designed.