Thom Yorke has written a new music score for the upcoming film Confidenza.
The Radiohead and The Smile frontman composed the original music for the film (which translates to “Trust”) from Italian director Daniele Luchetti, based on the book by Domenico Starnone.
The film stars Elio Germano, Vittoria Puccini and Isabella Ferrari, and follows Pietro Vella who works in a run down Roman high school. A synopsis reads: “He strongly believes he can help students strive for a better future and Teresa, and bright and rebellious student, is totally taken with him and his lessons. Then, a few years later, they meet up again and get romantically entangled. Teresa insists they must share their deepest secrets to bond for life. But as soon as Pietro really opens up, the relationship ends.”
— Thom Yorke (@thomyorke) January 24, 2024
The film is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) this month, but does not appear to have a confirmed 2024 wider release yet.
The festival’s description reads: “Enigmatic, claustrophobic and intense – amplified by Thom Yorke’s score – Confidenza is an exquisite thriller and a deep analysis of human behaviour.”
In a statement (via Variety) Luchetti described Confidenza as being about “an entire life that is conditioned by fear of being unmasked by your loved one,” who is “the only person whom, in a moment of abandonment, the protagonist trusts entirely”.
Confidenza is the latest score Yorke has composed, having first ventured into film music on 2018’s Suspiria. He’s also contributed to soundtracks for Motherless Brooklyn, Children Of Men and Vanilla Sky.
In a three-star review of Suspiria upon its release in 2018, NME wrote: “Yorke has big shoes to fill for his first foray into soundtrack work: Goblin’s original score is so famed, loved and damn iconic that there is a heavy expectation weighing upon him. His is first heard in Act 1, through a plaintive piano melody housing a pining falsetto. It’s all rather sonorous and innocuous, bearing passing semblance to his band’s, ‘Pyramid Song’, and his remaining work is sturdy and evocative, if not barnstorming in its residual impression.
Yorke had previously admitted to being “jealous” of his Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood‘s work on film scores.
“Jonny’s just so far ahead – he understands orchestration works, he can read music, he’s studied it all. I mean, he sits there studying scores,” he said in an interview with BBC Radio 1. “For Paul Thomas Anderson’s last film, he went away and read all the scores from the period of the composers of the time. That is not gonna happen with me cos I can’t read music.”