Album Review: Music For The Motion Picture Victoria [OST] by Nils Frahm

Nils Frahm said he wouldn’t do it until he found something really special, now he has. Victoria is a one-take feature film being nominated for all the Best Soundtrack awards, and tells the ominous tale of a runaway party girl who falls in with the wrong group of men in a Berlin nightclub. Having left the club, the group’s night of wandering develops into a far more worrisome scenario.

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Nils Frahm himself acknowledges that it’s taken him a fair old time to get round to making a film score. It’s especially surprising considering he seems so well suited to the job. Letting his pieces swell through arcs with subtlety and grace, littering them with motifs which could double as perfect emotional cues for any director, his music could easily be described as cinematic.

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There’s an awful lot of buzz surrounding the upcoming film Victoria, a German thriller shot in one continuous take that tells the story of a young woman who meets three men in a techno club, and ends up committing a bank robbery with them. By the sounds of that synopsis, you’d expect the soundtrack to be filled with hard, thumping, urgent electro – something reminiscent of the cult ’90s film Run Lola Run, perhaps. Instead, Victoria is scored by Nils Frahm in what is his first foray into film soundtracking.

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Head here to submit your own review of this album. For his first film score, Nils Frahm held out until the right project came along. After being approached by German director Sebastian Schipper to collaborate on the musical accompaniment for his film, Victoria, Nils recognized how it could be an inspiring experience. Shot in one take, the film tells the story of a girl who meets three charming men after a party and as the night continues finds herself assisting them in a bank robbery.

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Victoria is a German movie, filmed in one long shot. It observes the night of a young couple who meet, flirt, and stumble their way improbably into a violent heist. In the film's charged, uncertain atmosphere, the glow of anticipation from meeting someone new and the tingle of dread right before something awful happens both occur along one unbroken continuum: When life gets better, it is also one hair’s breadth away from getting worse.

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It's no surprise that Nils Frahm is frequently offered film soundtrack work, though he habitually turns it down. As a matter of creative freedom, Frahm only agreed to work on Victoria after its director, Sebastian Schipper, guaranteed that the German pianist and his long-term collaborators—cellist Anne Müller, violist Viktor Orri Árnason, experimental guitarist Erik K. Skodvin—could work on the music their usual way: improvising for hours on end.

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