Premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, “Last Days” revived the story of 26-year-old John Allen Chau who was killed in 2018 while attempting to convert the uncontacted tribe of North Sentinel Island to Christianity.
When the story was first published, Chau was condemned in the public eye as a modern colonizer and pseudo-racist, led astray by religious zeal, but a later article by Alex Perry published in Outside Magazine shed light on the complicated past of the young missionary. It’s that story, rooted in humanity, that director Justin Lin — known for his work on the “Fast & Furious” franchise — chose to explore.
“I know it’s a controversial subject, but Justin approached this film from the idea of, ‘What if I didn’t judge this character?’” said Nathan Alexander, who composed the film’s original score. “He saw the news story and had the same thought everyone did. But then he remembered, ‘Well, this is someone’s son. This is someone’s brother.’”
Those films that portray the humanness of a subject are Alexander’s bread-and-butter, with scores in recent projects like a Disney’s biopic “Clouds” and a soon-to-released film “Disfluency,” alongside his work on larger productions with composer Brian Tyler like “F9,” “Scream” and “Super Mario Bros.” “Last Days,” Alexander’s first film at Sundance, was another opportunity to use music as a tool to portray complex themes.
Alexander said that was one of the best parts about working with Lin, an experienced filmmaker who’s able to articulate his vision, and a supporter of using score to further tell the story.
“The last 10 minutes of the film are just visuals and music, so it’s 100% show-don’t-tell filmmaking,” Alexander said. “Working with someone who’s really hyped on themes and understands how to pepper them in and give little fragments and build them, so that by the end the audience recognizes them, is really rewarding and enriching, and it allows me as a composer to do something interesting.”
His process starts with identifying a project’s themes — and for “Last Days,” which intertwines four different storylines and jumps between timelines, adhering to the themes was key to keeping the musical tones clear throughout the film.
These themes are like a composer’s blueprint, providing a guideline aside from just the picture, Alexander said.
“You come up with the themes and the palette of the film because trying to nail that down away from the picture (with the director) is the most effective way to get on the same page and just be speaking a musical language that both of you can agree on that encapsulates the heart and the emotion and the message that you want to portray,” he said. “If you know what you want to do before you go into it, and you have intent, you’re going to get a much better result, piece of art, and you will not suffer your workflow at all.”
“Last Days’” main theme is about isolation and connection, Alexander said, which is evident in each of the four main plotlines: Chau, the main character; Meera, a fictionalized officer introduced as the foil; the father-son relationship with Chau’s father Patrick; and an abstract “calling” that ultimately ties everything together.
Alexander said he played with a variety of musical techniques to weave the stories together, especially in moments when the film hinges on internal emotions.
“I tend to use lots of acoustic elements, natural voices, and process them in some way that feels abstracted and quasi synthetic because that’s a good way for me to signal that this is something internal, this is about perception,” Alexander said.
He explained that the Chau and Meera themes are written as inversions of each other, with chordal and harmonic material that is designed to reflect the other. He describes Chau’s as more pure, beginning with piano, where Meera’s starts more electronic and gets more natural through the film’s progression.
While there are religious themes in the film, Alexander said he chose not to incorporate recognizable church music, with only subtle choir elements that are more motivated by his style than by thematic need.
“I, by happenstance of happening to be a huge fan of the human voice as an element, use it in places,” he said. “I use vocal palettes, very small choir, ensemble, but processed electronically. … Generally, we tried to avoid anything that was too on the nose.”
Alexander and his team had six-and-a-half weeks to write then record the film score, a crazy timeline that meant they relied on the collaboration to get everything done, he said. Most films are done with a team of writers and musicians, more like a band than a solo project, he said.
“I will sketch out a scene, write it a little bit, say what themes I want, then let them go do their thing. They’ll come back, and we’ll do notes and get it done,” he said. “It’s a very collaborative effort. And I personally love that, and I have no ego about being very transparent about that because I grew up in bands, and that’s way more fun than just being alone in a room.”
The end result is a score that suggests the emotional tone without forcing, he said, which is ultimately a composer’s goal.
“There’s always a risk with film where you can overstep and hold people’s hands when you’re trying to communicate something emotional that’s not really on screen. Music is the thing that communicates something that’s not being said or shown necessarily, right? So when you execute that in a way that people respond to, it feels like you lived up to your responsibility,” he said.
The audience seemed to receive it, he said.
“When we got to the end of the screening, people behind me were crying, it was great, because they felt it,” he said.
Right now, Alexander said after years of back-to-back film projects, he’s taking some time to write music for himself.
“When you’re writing film scores, you’re often executing someone else’s vision. You’re helping them speak in a language that they don’t speak. You’re doing something that’s great and collaborative, but ultimately executing on someone else’s vision,” he said. “So I am ready to take a break and just get back to what I want to say.”