Plaza Mayor Company Ltd release Navid Hejazi's score for Guidance. During a trip to the country, a young couple use “Guidance”, a device made to create enlightened people. But, as time passes, they subvert Guidance to manipulate and lie.. hoping to save what they are afraid of losing the most: each other...

For fans of subtle, reflective scores, Navid Hejazi's soundtrack for Guidance delivers a lot of mellow, emotive moments. It's almost meditative in its approach. It's stripped back, raw, but never dull.

If you're looking for strong, memorable themes, then you may come away a little disappointed. However if you're looking for a score that touches your soul on an emotional level then you could do much worse than this.

Talking about the score, composer Navid Hejazi said: "What I most loved about creating the score for Guidance was that I had the chance to try unexpected ways of scoring a movie. The score has a minimalistic approach on pretty much every cue. Neysan, the director, wanted it to be string driven. The solo strings are the main character in most of these cues and being a violin player I had the chance to record many different ideas and play around with them, bringing also the viola, the kamancheh, different bowed guitars, the electric violin and recording a little bit of cello I am able to play. Instead of start by creating themes, the first thing I did was to score the opening scene. As often happens, I went for a big score, with big orchestration, but after a few revisions we realized this movie needed a different approach than the one I originally had in mind. From this starting point I built the rest of the score. The main theme is made of a few dissonant notes played on the piano. We came up with this idea on the ninth version of the Intro, and it wasn’t until Neysan came by the studio and sat next to me to listen to the whole score that I came up with it. Surprisingly these few piano notes fit very well and ended up becoming an important part of the score."

It's one you really have to be in the mood for to really enjoy. I did like hearing the 'Alternate Intro' where you can witness the vision that Hejazi originally had. While it obviously wasn't quite right for the movie, I can't help wondering how the score would have panned out if this approach had been taken across the entire soundtrack. It's a bolder, fuller, richer sound that I really loved. Personally I think I would have found that a more rewarding soundtrack as an album in its own right.

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Darren Rea