12 Most Effective Musical Moments In Film

When we first meet Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), he is a quiet man, living an isolated existence. As time passes, we start realizing that he is severely depressed.

We see flashbacks to his life with his wife and their three children, but do not know what happened between them.

What we sense in the contrast between the warmth of the past and the bleakness of the present is that something horrific did. Something hollowed this man out and turned him into a person who wants to be anything but, a haunted something reflected in his name being whispered reverentially among the town's residents.

And then the gut-punching, heartrending, catastrophic reveal comes, enveloped in the titular piece.

Adagio is an incredible choice for this scene. The deep melancholy of the composition encompasses at once the tragedy of fate, the stunned recognition of a cruel and abrupt ending of happiness and an awareness of acts that cannot be undone.

This scene is not merely sad. It is one that reinvents sadness and tells us everything that we need to know about Lee, while justifying the contrast between his stumped existence and the innocent restlessness of his nephew.

It is a grave explanation for everything that we have seen before and everything that we are about to see, showing us one man's turning point while asking us to understand.