Anna Meredith Scores New Film ‘Wicker’
The composer built the score around strings and a range of recorders, including a 7-foot contrabass.
Anna Meredith has composed the original soundtrack for Wicker, a new comedic fable starring Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård and Peter Dinklage. The soundtrack is out alongside the film’s opening in UK and Irish cinemas, and includes the single “Escape On Cart.”
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Meredith built the score around strings and recorders, setting aside her usual array of electronics for the project. Rich Jones, Maddie Cutter and Jack Ross play strings, while Meredith and Otto Hashmi perform a range of recorders, from soprano to a 7-foot contrabass. The instrument’s sound, she said, helped her connect the music to the film’s characters and shifting tone.
“It was important to make sure I got the sound right. I wanted to write something that had a character, had an identity that felt authentic and real and natural but also a little bit distinctive and unusual. There’s a purity to some of the characters, and there’s something about recorders – for many of us, they’re the first instruments we ever learn. They’re so pared back – they have the most pure sound so the challenge was to use this to convincingly carry the variety of the film- from humour to heartbreak. Thematically, I tied the recorders to the Wicker Husband storyline and then strings are tied to the villagers and their destructive influence,” Meredith said.
Written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, Wicker adapts Ursula Wills’ short story “The Wicker Husband.” Colman plays a fisherwoman who, after being mocked by her neighbors, pays the local basketmaker, played by Dinklage, to weave her a spouse. A month later, the basketmaker delivers Skarsgård in a wicker suit developed by Wētā Workshop. Elizabeth Debicki, Nabhaan Rizwan and Marli Siu also appear, with Richard E. Grant as the village doctor.
Fischer said the directors wanted the music to take a prominent role in the film. “What we loved about Anna’s music and her scores is that they’re very bold and strange and propulsive. We thought that in this movie we’d have an opportunity to foreground the score, it was a chance to go big.” Meredith’s next studio album, DARLING, is due February 12, 2027, via Mercury KX. It will be her first album since 2019’s Mercury Prize-nominated FIBS.
