Lanthimos and his technicians have crafted an apt aural dimension for the Alps and their world, too; the still-life quiet of bourgeois Athenian ways of living is essential to the film’s building (and, in the end, shattering) of a recognizable, stifling environment and, like most any good contemporary European filmmaker (most of the best being spiritual children of Robert Bresson and his ingenious reconsiderations and displacements of movie sound), he makes a captivating virtue out of refusing any semblance non-diegetic score, though music as it occurs in the characters’ experience, particularly different kinds of music and what they represent, plays quite a significant narrative role…
The sound track is very fine; all of the sound is deep and multilayered, whether it’s the dialogue, the music (always strictly diegetic; there is no score), and other, less comfortable sounds make the precise impact that the Lanthimos and the film’s conscientious sound designers meant them to.
by Christopher McQuain (dvd talk), for “Alps”