Why Ludwig Goransson, not Hans Zimmer, is my favourite Christopher Nolan sound

Did you walk into The Odyssey expecting an orchestra? You probably knew it wouldn't sound like Tenet. But surely you expected, at the very least, the sweeping strings that have carried Christopher Nolan's last two films.Well. Surprise.The Odyssey has the most humane score Nolan has ever put his name to.It doesn't shove scenes forward the way Tenet and Oppenheimer do. It walks beside them instead, less an engine than a companion. In Ludwig Goransson's previous collaborations with Nolan, silence felt like an event. You noticed the exact moment the music disappeared. Here, you might not notice it at all. I've seen the complaints on social media. People wanted the grand orchestral treatment, the kind of score an epic poem that has survived three millennia and fathered half of Western literature supposedly deserves.But Nolan and Ludwig had other ideas. That quiet refusal, that stubborn restraint, is exactly why I love this score. Possibly forever.Before I explain why, a confession.My love for Ludwig Goransson, the man whose parents named him after Beethoven, didn't arrive quickly.I grew up on AR Rahman and Ilaiyaraaja. I was the kid who waited outside the neighbourhood music shop on the day a new Rahman album released, pleading with my parents for 40 rupees to buy the cassette. Hollywood scores came much later, and almost by accident.When I finally wandered beyond Tamil film music, Hans Zimmer got there first.The Dark Knight trilogy. Deshi Basara. Then Interstellar, and that docking sequence that felt, at the time, like cinema had reached its ceiling. Surely nothing could sound bigger than this.With the little I knew of Western film music, Zimmer and Nolan felt inseparable. Their work gave me the same joy Rahman and Ilaiyaraaja did. It reminded me that the best film music doesn't need a language at all. English songs have rarely stayed with me the way Tamil ones have, but Zimmer's scores didn't ask me to understand words. They simply made me feel.Then Ludwig arrived.Something shifted.Almost immediately, I found myself thinking he was built for epics the way Ryan Coogler and Christopher Nolan were built to direct them. Slowly, then all at once, I began to believe Nolan had found something in Ludwig that even Zimmer hadn't quite given him.I know that's the kind of opinion that starts arguments.Then again, I've spent enough evenings defending Rahman over Ilaiyaraaja, and losing just as many, to know this isn't nearly as reckless as it sounds.How I found LudwigBlack Panther was where I first noticed him, three collaborations into his partnership with Coogler, and only because the drums during Wakanda's introduction completely floored me.Massamba Diop's talking drum, weaving through those triumphant brass lines, did something to me I couldn't explain then. I didn't rush home to Google the composer. I simply let the film stay with me, the way the best films often do when you aren't trying too hard to love them.The reckoning arrived on a Saturday afternoon in Delhi, in that strange lull after India's first Covid lockdown lifted, when stepping into a cinema still felt faintly irresponsible.I went anyway.After months of watching everything on a 6.1-inch phone screen, I booked an IMAX ticket for Tenet. Somewhere in the middle of the Kiev Opera House siege, "Rainy Night in Tallinn" hit me.The seats shook.I felt it in my chest before I understood why.Whatever risk I had taken just to sit in that theatre paid for itself in those few minutes. I walked out more confused than moved, and oddly content with the confusion. I still don't fully understand Tenet. I've never really needed to.Ludwig's score was the thing that stayed.I've forgotten half the plot by now.I haven't forgotten that bass.That night, for the first time, I searched for Ludwig Goransson. Suddenly the talking drum from Black Panther clicked into place beside "Rainy Night in Tallinn."Two extraordinary scores.One composer.I had, rather belatedly, found my man.For years afterwards, Rainy Night in Tallinn and Travis Scott's The Plan lived on permanent rotation. When I finally bought a home theatre, Rainy Night in Tallinn was the first thing I played through it, and the bass still raises the hair on my arms every single time.Picture this.A rough morning behind you. A meeting ahead you would rather skip.Play Rainy Night in Tallinn.When the bass arrives around the three-minute mark, Ludwig practically drags you out of bed. Or reach for "Trucks in Place" instead, its mangled sirens doing more for your pulse than the coffee sitting next to your keyboard.Whether that adrenaline survives the meeting is no longer Ludwig's problem.That's the trick.The sound isn't decorative.It's function.And Tenet demanded exactly that kind of metal.The film is built around a palindrome, so Ludwig decided the score should behave like one too. He recorded percussion, reversed it, had musicians learn and perform that reversed rhythm, then flipped the recording back again until you genuinely couldn't tell which direction the music was moving.It wasn't clever for the sake of being clever.It was Tenet's central idea translated into sound.The same instinct runs through the fire-truck heist, where the growl of an actual engine becomes part of the score itself. Zimmer often gave Nolan's biggest moments melodies you carried home. Ludwig did something stranger.He built mechanisms instead of melodies.You don't walk out humming Rainy Night in Tallinn.You walk out still trapped inside it.Then came Oppenheimer.Tense. Melancholic. Coiled so tightly it felt as if it might snap.The track Quantum Mechanics, its violin lines stretching and folding over one another like the film itself. Twenty-four tracks of strings in the album, somehow sounding both intimate and apocalyptic.My sister still insists she cleared her post-graduation entrance exam because she listened to Quantum Mechanics on loop while studying.Music does that.It quietly threads itself into the machinery of our lives. Years later, we don't just remember a piece of music; we remember where we were when it became ours.Why Ludwig-Nolan is loveThat's what fascinates me about Ludwig's work with Nolan. When a director's vision and a composer's instincts line up this perfectly, the effect isn't simply pleasure. It's curiosity. You find yourself replaying a scene, trying to understand why it moved you.That why is the whole game.Ludwig has an uncanny gift for making you chase it.Then came Sinners.What is there left to say? For me, it's one of the great soundtracks.Delta blues braided into traditional Irish folk should have no business working in a vampire film. Somehow, it becomes the film's entire emotional argument. These aren't songs decorating the story; they're carrying parts of it that dialogue simply couldn't.I Lied To You, sung by Miles Caton, arrives just as the film folds time in on itself, collapsing musical eras the way the story collapses history. I use the word surreal too often.I mean it literally here.There is a line in the film that goes: "There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future."I've often wondered whether that line was written about the story, or quietly, about Ludwig himself.He always seems to save something extra for Ryan Coogler, his old college friend.Creed had swagger. Black Panther had wonder. Sinners went somewhere stranger than either.The Nolan partnership, meanwhile, is building its own identity, one score at a time.Which brings me back to The Odyssey.The soul of OdysseyBefore the film was released, Nolan made one thing clear to Ludwig: he had no interest in making a modern version of a 1950s Hollywood epic. Once that choice was made, the obvious one, an orchestra swelling beneath every emotional beat, simply disappeared.So they started somewhere else.Not in a concert hall, but inside the world of the film itself.When Troy falls, the city's warning system isn't just sound design. The frantic hammering of bronze plates gradually becomes part of the score itself, panic turning almost imperceptibly into grief. You're listening to Troy's fear long before you realise you're listening to music at all.The same philosophy runs through the lyre, the ancient stringed instrument that becomes Odysseus' musical signature.Rather than treating it as another "ancient" prop dressed up with modern orchestration, Ludwig sought out musicians who could play it as it would have been played three thousand years ago. That single plucked string becomes Odysseus' private signature throughout the film.And then comes the payoffIn the film's climax, Penelope's contest is built around a bow only Odysseus can string. She knows it. The audience knows it. The suitors don't. One after another they fail, until the ragged beggar quietly reaches for the bow.Before the truth is spoken, you hear it. The unmistakable pluck of the lyre string that has followed Odysseus throughout the film cuts through the silence. Penelope hears it too. Something in her expression changes, as though a part of her recognises him before her mind is willing to believe it.That's Ludwig at his most restrained. Not an orchestra announcing a hero's return, not a triumphant swell demanding your attention. Just the sound of a single string being plucked, carrying the weight of a reunion 20 years in the making.Then there's the aulos, an ancient Greek wind instrument that almost disappeared with history itself. Ludwig resurrects it not as a novelty, but as a feeling. It slips quietly beneath storms, battles and long stretches at sea until it becomes part of the film's emotional bloodstream.By the final scene, as Odysseus and Penelope sail away together, that same mournful sound glides seamlessly into the end-credits song, "When I'm Home". An instrument separated from us by thousands of years somehow finds its way into a contemporary song about returning home.That feels like the film in miniature.Nothing announces itself.That's the point.It's why tracks like Siren and Chasing the Escaping Sun never hit you the way Rainy Night in Tallinn or Quantum Mechanics do. There's no bass drop waiting around the corner. No obvious crescendo asking for applause.The score arrives the way weather does. You don't notice it changing. You simply realise, somewhere near the end, that it has been steering you all along.And that, finally, is why I keep returning to my thoroughly unfashionable little opinion.Zimmer gave Nolan a sound I once thought was impossible to surpass. He taught me that blockbuster cinema could sound as grand and emotionally overwhelming as anything I had grown up with.But Ludwig has given Nolan something rarer. Not a signature sound, but the confidence to begin again with every film. Tenet sounds like nothing else. Oppenheimer refuses to sound like Tenet. The Odyssey refuses to sound like either of them. Each score feels discovered rather than composed, as though it belongs to that film alone.This isn't an argument that Hans Zimmer was lesser. It's an argument that Ludwig Goransson has become the collaborator this version of Christopher Nolan, the one making Tenet, Oppenheimer and now The Odyssey, needed most.That's just my ear, shaped by Rahman and Ilaiyaraaja, talking.Not a verdict.- EndsPublished By: Prachi aryaPublished On: Jul 19, 2026 14:32 IST