Sean Baker‘s “Anora” is a wild and moving movie, a skewed fairy tale that veers from slapstick comedy and romance to action and tragedy, hitting every other tone on the emotional scale along the way. Yet Baker didn’t want a traditional score — there’s no music that isn’t source (predominantly the needle drops in the strip club where Mikey Madison‘s title character works), and thus none of the typical clues to guide the audience’s responses to the tonal shifts.

That created a challenge for sound designers, supervising sound editors, and re-recording mixers John Warrin and Andy Hay, whose sound environments had to serve the function that music would in a more conventional film. “It leads to a situation where sound design often behaves as score,” Hay told IndieWire. “Texturally, emotionally, what are we trying to say in any given moment? That leads us to various decisions.