WaterTower Music bring us Carter Burwell's original score for The Good Liar. The movie, directed by Bill Condon and starring Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen, is a thriller about the secrets people keep and the lies they live...

For the most part Carter Burwell delivers a good, solid, functional score for The Good Liar. There's no surprises here, nor anything that will really catch your ear. What it does offer is a selection of rich themes that slowly grow as the movie progresses.

Talking about the project, Burwell said: "The Good Liar opens with a classic overture, during which the main characters and their musical themes are introduced. The characters meet and we we see that, like most people, they are not completely honest with each other. But five minutes into the film you know the level of deceit is much more serious than that. As is obvious from its title, The Good Liar is about untruth, so early on I asked Bill [director Bill Condon] how much lying the music should do. He felt the most important role for the score was to keep drawing us in, weaving its own web to tangle us enjoyably in the misdeeds we're watching. Not so much lying to the audience as making them co-conspirators."

The album contains 17 tracks (47 min, 39 sec) and while it obviously works best when heard in the movie, I think the biggest problem here is the reliance on a handful of themes, which end up making the entire score feel a little too small.

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Darren Rea