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Composer

Clint Mansell

6: briefs
13:00: average
78 min: in total

On film.briefs6

The Fountain

Darren Aronofsky · 2006

Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film interweaves three timelines—a conquistador, a neurosurgeon, and a space traveller—all played by Hugh Jackman, bound to Rachel Weisz across centuries by love and loss. Shot on a Montreal soundstage with macro photography and a tightly controlled palette, it uses repetition, motif, and Clint Mansell’s score to explore mortality not as endpoint but as condition. Though commercially unsuccessful and critically divided, it has endured as a precise, austere, and emotionally resonant study of devotion in the face of time’s erosion.

The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky · 2008

Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 drama follows Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, an ageing professional wrestler clinging to identity through performance as his body fails and his relationships fray. Shot on 16mm by Maryse Alberti and scored by Clint Mansell, it stars Mickey Rourke in a physically exacting performance that revitalised his career. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice and received critical acclaim for its restraint, realism, and unsentimental treatment of ageing, labour, and obsolescence.

Requiem for a Dream

Darren Aronofsky · 2000

Requiem for a Dream (2000), directed by Darren Aronofsky and adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel, traces four Brooklyn lives unravelling under addiction — to drugs, television, validation, and fantasy. Shot by Matthew Libatique and edited by Jay Rabinowitz with over 2,000 cuts, its visual and rhythmic intensity mirrors psychological disintegration. Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans perform with physical and emotional extremity. Clint Mansell’s score reinforces the film’s oppressive momentum. Though lauded for its craft and emotional force, its schematic structure limits sociological depth. It remains a landmark of arthouse intensity — demanding, unrelenting, and formally singular.

Stoker

Park Chan-wook · 2013

Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut is a Southern Gothic psychological thriller about an 18-year-old girl whose father’s death brings his enigmatic brother into her life. As buried family truths surface, her acute perception becomes both weapon and wound. Stylised cinematography, Clint Mansell’s score and restrained performances build a world where atmosphere carries more weight than exposition.

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky · 2010

Nina Sayers, a disciplined but fragile dancer at a New York ballet company, wins the lead in Swan Lake and starts losing her grip on reality as she competes with a looser, more sensual rival for the role's darker half. Aronofsky built the film from a decade-old idea about doppelgängers and understudies, shot it on a $13 million budget with Matthew Libatique's camera pressed close to Portman's face, and had his lead actors train in ballet for months before a single scene was filmed.

Loving Vincent

Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman · 2017

A postman's reluctant son delivers Vincent van Gogh's last letter a year after the painter's suicide and, meeting the people who knew him in his final weeks, starts doubting the official account of how he died. Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's Loving Vincent is the first fully painted animated feature, built from oil paintings made in Van Gogh's own technique over sixty-five thousand hand-shot frames, a six-year production that treats the investigation plot mainly as scaffolding for its visual project.