The Invisible Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the score album to the 2020 film The Invisible Man, inspired by H. G. Wells' novel of the same name. Composed by Benjamin Wallfisch, the album was released on February 21, 2020 by Back Lot Music, a week before the film's release. Wallfisch used string orchestra to compose for the film, mimicking Bernard Herrmann's technique for the score of Psycho (1960), while blending synth and electronic music. It was released on vinyl editions by Death Waltz Recording Company and Mondo on June 5, 2020.
Background
Benjamin Wallfisch composed the film's score, who recalled that he was approached by the film's team through phone call imagining an interpretation of how a classic film should look like. He watched the final edit and impressed by Elisabeth Moss' performance which he called it as "powerful" and agreed to be a part of the film. Wallfisch said: "the film is incredibly visceral and quite stylized in the sense that it feels almost like a classic Hitchcockian thriller, but with a very modern take. And the film isn't afraid to upend a lot of the expectations one might have from a horror/thriller genre. It's a very unique and extraordinarily well-crafted film, and very precise in its choices, editorially, and how the audience is really kept absolutely on the edge of their seat throughout. Leigh's vision was to have the music very much as a character, and not just as underscore. We really wanted the score to take an active role in the experience of the film. A lot of it was about articulating and using silence in a very rhythmic way. By that I mean: when there is music, it tends to be very left field, bold and quite extreme. So you almost don't trust the absence of music when there's silence. By doing that the silence almost becomes a musical event. There are very careful structural choices that were made to maximize that."
Composition
Inspiring Bernard Herrmann's composition style for Psycho (1960), for which he used a string orchestra, Wallfisch replicated the same technique for writing the score, claiming it as "a love letter to Herrmann in his way". He added "For a long time I wanted to write a score where, in terms of the orchestration, it's only strings, because the string players are really pushed to their absolute max when they don't have the support of a full orchestra. It's a much more intense sound in many ways, when you're asking just strings to play as if they're a full orchestra. That was the orchestral choice for this score." But in addition of strings, he further used electronic and synth music to give "a twisted and nervy edge".
He called the score as almost like weaponizing silence, saying "When the score isn’t there, you almost don’t trust almost it the way you don’t trust the empty spaces on the screen". Hence he did not underscore for the film so that they need the audience to "specifically time the moments and thinking about how that cue ends and how that cue begins so that moment feels so tense".
For Cecilia and Adrian, there is a deliberate contrast between their music. Cecilia's theme consisted of a cello which had been heard three to four times in some key sequences. He used unusual mixing techniques that "sometimes surrounding the audience with a wall of sound, and sometimes only using one microphone on one violin". Adrian's theme consisted of electronic and synth music, as the character mastered the science of invisibility. He thought of how that sounds technologically if it embodied music as a result, he influenced on electronic dance music to produce a "dark, gritty and cinematic" sound. He also had a synth leitmotif that "shifts in tone throughout and gives him presence even when you can’t see him".