Hildur Guðnadóttir on darkness, dolls, and doing things her own way
In a recent interview with Claire Jackson for BBC Music Magazine, composer Hildur Guðnadóttir turned out to be nothing like the music that made her famous. Jackson admitted she was caught off guard — someone responsible for the oppressive soundscapes of Joker, Chernobyl, and Tár has no business being this warm and upbeat in person. Hildur takes the observation in stride. She’s heard it before. What she’s keen to clarify is that her pull toward the darker side of human experience isn’t some personal affliction — it’s a lifelong fascination.
One of her most recognised pieces is the “Bathroom Dance” from Todd Phillips’s 2019 film Joker. It arrives at a turning point for Arthur Fleck — a man unravelling under the weight of violence and mental illness. He ducks into a public restroom still wearing his clown costume, faces himself in the mirror, and starts to move. The melody that rises beneath him isn’t triumphant. It’s mournful, and that’s exactly the point. It marks the moment Arthur stops fighting who he’s becoming.
Hildur was born in 1982 into a household where music was simply the air. Her father, clarinettist Guðni Franzson, and her mother, mezzo-soprano Ingveldur G. Ólafsdóttir, gave her a cello at five. She took to it. Her solo work arrived later — debut album Mount A in 2006, followed by Without Sinking in 2009. The awards came in a rush after that: a Grammy Award in 2020 for Chernobyl, then an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Joker later that same year.
Her score for Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár showed a different kind of challenge. The film circles Lydia Tár, a conductor at the height of her power whose fixation on a young woman begins to pull everything apart — her marriage, her reputation, her grip on reality. Cate Blanchett plays Lydia as someone plagued by hypersensitivity to sound, nightmares, and hallucinations. Hildur’s music had to live inside that same fractured headspace.
Jackson also got Hildur talking about her latest album, Where To From, which draws on fragments of everyday life recorded on her phone. The cover image looks, at first glance, like an old photograph of a small girl. It isn’t. It’s a doll — made by Hildur’s friend Gisele Vienne. Open the booklet and there are more of them, each one quietly unsettling in a way that feels very much in keeping with how Hildur works.
Hildur speaks about Vienne’s craft with genuine enthusiasm. The idea of the doll as a trapped figure has a long history in art, and she finds that tension — something that looks alive but isn’t, something familiar but slightly wrong — endlessly interesting. It’s the same thread running through all of her work: not horror for its own sake, but the strange, uncomfortable places just beneath the surface of ordinary things.
