The independent film “Grassland” is a kind of miracle when it comes to its emotional effects. A subtle, modestly scaled drama about a single mother struggling to make a living selling marijuana in a time and place — 2008 in Montclair, New Jersey — where it is not yet legal, the film is quiet and restrained in its style yet packs an emotional punch like no other American movie so far this year. Relying on a carefully orchestrated accumulation of details and gestures, it builds to a devastating climax before the audience realizes how completely they’ve been sucked into the movie’s world.
A key factor in the film’s impact is Zach Nicita‘s extraordinary score — a score that’s even more impressive given that it’s the composer’s first. Nicita’s background is as a drummer and a composer for movie trailers, two skills that inform his score for “Grassland” even though the connections might not seem obvious at first — with its austere, meticulously placed cues and stripped-down instrumentation, it’s the polar opposite of the bombastic studio blockbusters like “Captain America: Brave New World” for which Nicita created trailer music.
“In the trailer world, it’s all about making music that sounds expensive,” Nicita told IndieWire. “I think that really made me hone in on my production chops and make things sound professional. Even on ‘Grassland,’ where I didn’t want anything to sound overly pristine or perfect, I’m applying that knowledge in subtle ways because I still want a quality sound. It’s an interesting balance of wanting it to sound raw and authentic, but still made by someone who works at a high level.”
Authenticity is indeed one of the great strengths of Nicita’s score, which weaves in and out of the sound design so elegantly that at times the viewer doesn’t even register that they’re listening to music; it seeps into the subconscious and amplifies the movie’s emotional effects without overpowering them. “I wanted to create a score that felt like it came from the spaces you were seeing on screen,” Nicita said. “If there’s a scene in a house, I would literally model a reverb plug-in to a house — I would pick a setting that sounded like an attic or a living room so I could really lean into that space.”
Blurring the line between the sound of the music and the sound of the space is something Nicita admired in Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score for “Chernobyl,” though he didn’t really have time to bring too many conscious influences into “Grassland.” Nicita came on to the project after it had already been shot and scored by another composer whose work didn’t fit what the filmmakers were looking for; as a result, he only had a month to score the entire film, and every instrument you hear in the movie was played by Nicita in his studio.
While the accelerated schedule left Nicita thinking there were one or two places where he could have tweaked the music, overall he felt it was a benefit in that he didn’t have time to second-guess his immediate emotional response to the material. “If I don’t have a deadline, I can succumb to decision paralysis,” Nicita said. “I start asking, ‘Why am I doing this? Is this good?’ I don’t know the purpose. In this context, I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have time to overthink anything, so I really had to trust my initial instincts. I didn’t have time to think about it beyond feeling it in the moment, and I think that helped me do good work.”
Indeed, there’s a confidence to Nicita’s score, and to the filmmaking as a whole, that allows the viewer to relax into “Grassland” early on; it’s not straining for its effects or showing off, and the minimalist quality causes the viewer to lean in in a way that’s more immersive than if Nicita was battering us with melodramatic music from beginning to end. “For this score, less was more pretty much all the way through,” Nicita said. “Most of the time it was about, ‘Can we strip this out? Can we lower this?’ It’s very sensitive subject matter, so every sound and every moment where I chose to have music really could make or break the tone. I really tried to err on the side of caution.”
While Nicita is excited to score more features, he knows it will be tough to live up to the experience of his debut. “It was really emotionally fulfilling,” he said. “I felt truly invested in every cue, and that’s really important because I think it’s always going to yield the best results. As a creative, the end goal is to find those projects where you really feel truly connected to it, and I felt that the entire way through. It never felt like a job.”
“Grassland” is now available on all digital platforms. The soundtrack will be available on April 25.
