The swooping strings of Mica Levi’s beautiful ghost-like score set a tone of melancholy and sensitively added weight to Pablo Larraín's searing and intimate portrait of Jackie Kennedy in the events leading up to and following the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy.

Starring Natalie Portman as Jackie, the events covered in the film – from that fateful day in Dallas, her return to the White House, arrangements for the funeral, and her time spent accompanying the coffin to Arlington Cemetery - offer a moving tale of a grieving woman, wife and mother as she struggles to maintain her husband's legacy and the world of 'Camelot' that they created and loved so well. In Larraín's near-experimental look at loss and legacy, what could have been a tear-soaked standard biopic is instead bracingly, gloriously his own, and it's all the better for it.

But without Levi’s score the film might be less complete. Like a solid frame to a complex painting, it concretizes and helps control the artistic experience making the entire endeavour more beautiful by creating sound that is not only atmospheric, but definitive to the film itself. With the power of an orchestra behind her, Levi provided Jackie with a palpitating pulse for the film’s portrait of a seemingly unknowable historical figure.

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