Ontology of Noise in After the Hunt

This week, let’s talk about the music of After the Hunt — a fascinating case for several reasons.

First, and perhaps the least relevant one, is that I’ve been wanting to discuss the creative partnership between Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — also known for their industrial rock project Nine Inch Nails. Personally, that’s not my genre, but what they do in the cinematic world truly captivates me. The two met in the late 1990s and made their film-scoring debut with The Social Network (2010), a project that earned them an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA, among others. Since then, we’ve heard their work in Soul, Challengers, and most recently, After the Hunt.

I want to focus on what their collaboration represents. Their restlessness with electronic sound is well known and, I think, part of what makes them shine. But in terms of audience perception and cultural impact, how does that translate?

The use of elements that, simply by existing, depend on and represent electricity, technology, the digital world, numbers, and abstraction, speaks to a shift in our social perception of reality... and with it, to how we adapt and build stability.

Having Reznor and Ross compose the score for a drama that deals with such sensitive social themes (which we won’t unpack today) reflects new associations with chaos, tension, and humanity — where circuitry and connection are now inevitably embedded, already part of the fabric, even explaining emotion itself… reality itself.

Their music points to an ontological transformation of emotion orchestrated through sound — another instance of music’s power.

With Reznor and Ross, we encounter imbalance and transition turned into sonic texture. Their music carries elements of reality that anchor us to a context in which the noises of daily life (sounds that mirror our condition as a digital society) become integral to storytelling: mastered, organized, and arranged into grammars of contemporaneity that operate simultaneously as texture and narrative in the films we consume.

It’s also important to note how these grammars are delicately interwoven with the alternate realities the film proposes and exposes. In After the Hunt, this is especially striking through the use of silence and the ticking clock.

The sound of the clock appears at three strategic moments in the film: it underlines and measures the flow of chaos, reminding us that everything is, in fact, a ticking time bomb. What we hear before and after those moments seems like an attempt to domesticate and control what appears as noise — that unexpected emotional complication.

The soundtrack of After the Hunt builds emotional vertigo through digital textures and human dissonances, integrating us into the film’s narrative fabric. Here, human subjectivity intertwines with irregular textures and new communicative contexts that, by their very nature, are complex and unpredictable.

It’s curious to think that this duo, just a few weeks earlier, worked on another production: Tron: Ares. For that project, they were reportedly asked to sign under the name Nine Inch Nails — though that’s a story for another episode. For now, it feels right that this discussion happens through After the Hunt: the film offers a much more intricate terrain for thinking about the role of music precisely because of how it weaves emerging contexts with human complexity.

Choosing Reznor and Ross (artists whose sound embodies both collision and flow through electronic resources) feels almost symbolic. When we strip those sounds of their everyday presence... when we isolate them from the environments where we’ve normalized them... they become abstract again.

In that sense, thinking about these polarizing issues — taking a stance, and the actions that follow — mirrors what the film’s sound world suggests: that the task of defining identity, in the midst of chaos, is as abstract and intricate as the effort to control the clock of noise.

Original Version