La Cocina: Voices, Habit, and Chaos

This week, I wanted to make a special episode in light of what happened last week at the Ariel Awards, the prizes given by the Mexican Academy of Film Arts and Sciences.

This time, the winner for Best Original Music was Tomás Barreiro for La Cocina.

I spent the weekend thinking about it — and rethinking it — and here’s what this creative work has stirred in me, and why I believe it deserves to be listened to carefully.

This soundtrack runs for about 30 minutes and gives tension and mystery to a story based on the 1957 play The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker.

The music itself begins with a certain dark, theatrical atmosphere, doing justice to its origins.The use of choirs in low, shadowed registers reinforces the strength of the human voice — and everything that comes with it: action, decision, risk, transformation — all innate, and I’d dare say, exclusive to society itself.

But it also condenses our own idiosyncrasy: our perennial enslavement to a habitus forged by an economic system, to the urban ethos of working life, and to the silencing of our emotional side.Listen closely to the choirs in this soundtrack — they sound like a constant, dark march toward the inevitable that, ironically, we ourselves (here embodied as voices) keep feeding.

For those who haven’t seen the film, spoiler alert — consider this your warning.

La Cocina is mostly a black-and-white film. There are two key scenes where the tone shifts, and it’s interesting that, visually, these moments are considered “accents.”I think the music mirrors that — Barreiro uses electronic sounds to mark moments of special tension.

So what does it mean to introduce these sounds within a sonic narrative — to highlight certain moments?

It reminds me a bit of the Fantastic Four episode — where interruption itself generates tension and a change in atmosphere. In this case, I’d call it an accent.

There’s one track — Restaurante 2 — that I find particularly evocative. It sustains a kind of “everyday” atmosphere, one we could naturally expect to hear in a restaurant.But then, again, the voices appear — this time playfully, in a different register.

And that raises a question: Why do mid registers often communicate familiarity or comfort, while low registers tend to anticipate transformation?

Psychoacoustic perception usually associates lower sounds with power, danger, or solemnity, and mid-range tones with closeness and naturalness.

Returning to the soundtrack — later, in Ticketera, the soundscape goes back to everyday noises, reflecting the normality that surrounds us.You can even hear the sound of a cash register — a perfectly ordinary object in that world.

If you listen carefully, there’s a mechanism that gives this piece a kind of chaotic polyformic habit — meaning, a construction of multiple superimposed sound layers and textures that reflect diversity and change.

To unpack that: “chaotic” because the music makes it clear that, through sounds drawn from within the kitchen itself, a kind of chaos emerges. “Habit,” because the use of these materials grounds that daily turmoil in the everydayness the visuals attempt to portray.And “polyformic,” because the way these sounds are musically woven together also reflects the cultural diversity the film encapsulates and unravels.

The soundtrack closes by returning to where it began — to the choirs: murmurs and small, individually sung fragments that now feel like a collective lament, interrupted by these isolated voices with which the music ends.It’s as if the score traced its own narrative about presence — about enduring the constant coexistence with chaos through everyday life, and ending with the statement that we still are, still feel — resistance.

The film’s final dialogue — if I remember correctly — goes something like:

“What else do you want?”I can’t recall if it was want or need — but either way, as I always say, it’s the music that carries the answer.

La Cocina and its music remind us that yes — we are part of something bigger, something imposed, something we can’t escape. Hence the association with deep vocal registers.It also reminds us that we are part of a neoliberal ethos, something more chaotic — again expressed through synthesizers and ordinary objects interwoven in sound.Ultimately, this whole ensemble — the human and the everyday within the music — reminds us that we are also chaos.And even so, we resist.

So, bravo to Tomás Barreiro for capturing all this through the art of time, and for his fearless articulation of musical elements, symbolism, and social resonance.I already congratulated him on social media, but I’ll say it again here: well deserved.

And that wraps up this week’s capsule — I’m truly happy to talk about a film that reflects Mexican talent in every sense. I’m sure more will come — and when they do, we’ll be here, breaking down the sociocultural dimensions that make music not just what we hear, but what gives meaning to what we see.

Original Version