The Violin Case (Original Motion Picture
Soundtrack) marks the first feature-length scoring assignment for
Portuguese-Macanese composer António Vale da Conceição, written for the
debut feature by director Max Bessmertny (2025). The film unfolds over a
single night in Macao — the former Portuguese enclave on China's
southern coast — as a struggling American painter frantically searches
for a violin artwork left behind in a taxi. The soundtrack is released
on Plaza Mayor Company Ltd, a London/Hong Kong-based independent label
specialising in international film scores.
Conceição's music mirrors
the very fabric of Macao itself: a city of five languages and layered
cultural identities. Across eighteen cues, the score weaves cinematic
textures and rhythmic precision into an intimate sonic journey that
moves from nocturnal unease ("Sauvage", "The Taxi Ride") through moments
of wry comedy ("Mah Jeong Is Good", "Le Party") and deepening
existential drift ("He So Sad", "Lost Baby"). Track titles in English,
French, Spanish, and transliterated Cantonese echo the film's
multilingual cast and its surrealist odyssey through Macao's back alleys
after dark.
The film was shot in September 2022 on location across
forty Macao sites, drawing on the city's social aesthetic from the 1970s
through the 1990s. Conceição, whose previous credits include INA,
Beautiful Game, and Beyond the Spreadsheet: The Story of TM1, brings his
characteristic ability to craft soundscapes that shift between intimate
melody and expansive layered arrangement — a quality well suited to a
story that Bessmertny explicitly modelled on Scorsese's After Hours: a
city-at-night thriller in which a single misfortune spirals inexorably
out of control.
Tracklist:
1. Sauvage
2. The Flying Robber
3. The Taxi Ride
4. The Taxi Driver
5. I'm Somebody
6. Rashed
7. Le Party
8. Let Me In
9. No Me Diga Que No Duele
10. Sauvage Deux
11. Pretty
12. Napoleon on the Beach
13. Hanoi
14. I Remember You
15. He So Sad
16. Lost Baby
17. Mah Jeong Is Good
18. Baby is Lost
