“The Undoing: A Case Study on Horrifyingly Beautiful Sound Design”

This article may contain spoilers for the 2020 HBO show: The Undoing.

From the moment I sat down to watch HBO’s hit television miniseries, The Undoing, I was not only intrigued but also unnerved by the incredible use of sound and sound design on the project.

Released in 2020, The Undoing tells the tale of a seemingly perfect family having their life turned upside down by the murder of a young woman. Series star and executive producer, Nicole Kidman, takes the role of Grace Fraser- a wife, mother, and clinical psychologist. Her Husband, Jonathan Fraser (Hugh Grant) starts the show as an esteemed oncologist- loved and beloved by his community.

Throughout the first 20 minutes of the series, the audience is invited to fall in love with the fantastic lives of the Fraser family, just before taking it all away.  While sound is an integral point in the production of any series, it was obvious from the start that creator David E. Kelley and director Suzanne Bier utilized greatly sonic storytelling in their twisted thriller. 

Foley

_{Sound 24, Glenn Freemantle sitting at a soundbar, 2018.}

In order to understand what made the sound design of The Undoing so spectacular, let’s first take a look at what sound design for the screen actually entails. During the filming of a scene, the sound department’s job is to focus on capturing the audio of the actors. When filming outside or with other uncontrollable factors, the audio can become muddied, and Automated Dialogue Replacement, or ADR, is used to aid in the editing process for nice, clean sound.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, other background sounds are added back into the recording by sound designers to add depth to the story. Sometimes, these sounds are pulled from pre-recorded sonic libraries. Other times, they are performed and recorded by foley artists. While talking with Academy Origins, artist, Alicia Stevenson, commentated,

“Foley is the art of putting sound effects to picture after a film has already been shot.“

The job of a foley artist is to transform a film, television series, or video game into a piece of cinema by enhancing what our ears and brains experience. In my opinion the most interesting aspect is the unconventional methods that are used to make the sounds we hear in theatres. Joanna Fang, a foley artist for PlayStation Studios, explained,

“We have to do our best [to] divorce where these props are from and where we can take them.” 

The artist exemplified this point by using toilet plungers to make the sound of horses trotting. In foley studios, any object can be repurposed to create a new sound. Sometimes, the artists will even use their voices. Gary Hecker, a foley artist who worked on pieces such as Djano Unchained and The Hunger Games, explained how he used his voice to help animate the sound of water freezing over

As important as the foley artists are, they would not be able to do their job without the help of foley mixers. Foley mixers are tasked with capturing and editing the raw sounds the artist creates.  Both the foley artists and foley mixers work in tandem to create the sounds on screen. In addition to these workers, a sound effects supervisor is tasked with determining what specific sounds to capture. When the foley artists are working on a project, they work with 15-minute clips called A-B reels. The sound effect supervisor adds streamers- little white lines across the screen to help the artists know how to time out the sound effect.

While the foley team is working on creating the “background sounds” another group of people is working on all the other aspects of cinematic sound such as musical scoring. Both the music department and the sound department are tasked with accommodating the constant changes from one another in order to coordinate their efforts effectively. 

On The Undoing, Glenn Freemantle (oscar-winning sound designer/supervising sound editor) and Ben Barker (supervising sound editor/designer) headed up a sound department of over 30 workers. This list included, but was not limited to, foley artists/mixers, sound designers/mixers, ADR recordists/mixers and boom operators. The Undoing was neither the first nor the last project of their partnership. Before the series, the two worked on Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Gravity (2013), and 7 Days in Entebbe (2018). They continued their partnership after the miniseries’ success with Paddington in Peru (2024) and Warfare (2025).

Breakdown

As most people can attest, first impressions matter. And the first impression The Undoing gives the audience is offputting, yet, intriguing. The opening sequence of the first episode starts with the unnerving montage of a little girl playing with flowers and bubbles while Kidman’s eerie cover of Dream A Little Dream of Me plays in the background. The shot ends with the girl popping a bubble to showcase the ethereal reality that is about to come crashing down for the family.

The show then opens to b-roll shots of the city with the voiceover of the victim’s son, Miguel Alves (Edan Alexander), inquiring about his mother’s whereabouts. The scene relies heavily on the orchestral music to build tension and highlight the horror the boy is experiencing as he discovers her brutalized body. As the film progresses to introduce Grace, the tone transitions to a light-hearted Hallmark style look-through the city with harp and violins in the background. 

The moment in which I realized how heavily sound would play a role in the film was during the first appearances of our male leads. The scene starts with Jonathan attempting, all-be-it failing, to tie his tie for work whilst the son, Henry is making a smoothie. The blender grind starts in the background of the shot of Grace getting ready in the morning and immediately cuts away to Henry and Jonathan in the kitchen.

The artistic decision to have an incredibly quiet set juxtaposed to an incredibly loud and grading sound effect pulled attention to the deafening silence of the scene.

As Grant begins his lines, the audio is incredibly crisp and intensified with absolutely no background noise. Every sound- Grace walking down the stairs, Henry clinking the blender against his cup, Jonathan’s tie sliding across his collar and, subsequently, crinkling the dress shirt- has been intentionally added back into the story to pull the audience into the world of the characters. It creates a world that feels incredibly realistic whilst actually overdramatizing what one would normally experience in real life. 

The City

_{“Grace walking through NYC,” The Undoing, directed by Suzanna Bier, 2020.}

The Undoing is a series, in its entirety, dedicated to making the audience take the mental position of its characters. In an interview with American Cinematheque, Nicole commentated on how the show is meant to highlight the thoughts the characters are feeling. By creating the deafened world with heightened sensitivities towards the environmental sounds presented, it invites the audience to feel overly connected to the events unfolding in front of them- a decision which makes the awful discoveries throughout the show all the more horrifying to those watching at home. 

In addition to the environmental sounds of the characters, the sonic profile of the city scape is an important and poignant aspect to the tone of the show. When discussing the film series in an interview with Jennifer Walden, Freemantle and Barker commentated on the role New York City played in the show by saying,

 “We came up with the idea to use the organic sounds of the city as the core of our sound design work…NYC is a real character of any show and we wanted to record as much as we could to be true to this.”

The Violin

_{“Henry holding his violin,” The Undoing, directed by Suzanna Bier, 2020.}

While the series is mainly focused on Grace and Jonathan, Noah Jupe’s character, Henry Fraser,  is given the unique chance to propel the story with his violin. As previously mentioned, the musical scoring of the film is classical. Since a less-noticable undertone of the show is the dynamics of classism and elitism, the choice of having classical music as the backing track adds a sense of mockery to the story. Within the first 20 minutes of the first episode, Henry and Jonathan have a conversation about his love for his instrument. The violin continues to help drive the plot all the way until, spoiler alert, Grace finds the murder weapon inside its case at the end of the 5th episode. 

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Conclusion

At its core, The Undoing, is designed to make its audience uncomfortable. Being a psychological thriller, the intent is not to merely scare the audience. Its intent is to scare the audience with reality- a much more horrifying idea than a clown with a red balloon if you ask me. 

The film walks the audience through the horrors of masked evil, and the psychological tournament of not knowing who or what to trust. Through sound design, the production team unnerved, frightened, and scared the audience into the ugly reality of human brutality. 

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Sources

Academy Originals. “Foley Artists: How Movie Sound Effects Are Made.” YouTube, Google, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_tqB4IZvMk&list=PLmrT2wTGky_Slb0fWTF1sHZLZr0ZP4Omg&index=9&t=8s. Accessed 20 May 2025.

American Cinematheque. “THE UNDOING | Q&A with Nicole Kidman & Hugh Grant.” YouTube, Google, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G68EzFhNWK0&list=PLmrT2wTGky_Slb0fWTF1sHZLZr0ZP4Omg&index=10&t=15s. Accessed 20 May 2025.

IMDb. “The Undoing (TV Mini Series 2020).” IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8134470/. Accessed 20 May 2025.

Kelley, David E., creator. The Undoing. 2020. HBO, 2020. HBO, https://play.max.com/show/32b441d9-77ef-4362-ad18-b1635eb8558d. Accessed 20 May 2025.

Sound 24. Glenn Freemantle sitting at a soundbar. Sound Technology, November 2018, https://www.soundtech.co.uk/case-studies/sound-24 . Accessed 22 May, 2025

‘The Undoing” Episode 5: Why Henry Fraser did NOT kill Elena Alves? This Theory will make you scratch your head. Henry holding his violin. Meaww, 23 November, 2020, https://meaww.com/the-undoing-episode-5-henry-fraser-kill-elena-alves-grace-jonathan-son-theory-spoilers-hbo-show. Accessed 22 May, 2025

The Undoing, The Undoing, created by David E. Kelley, performance by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, season 1, episode 1, HBO, 2020. Accessed 2025. Screen recording.

Walden, Jennifer. “Doing The Sound On HBO’s The Undoing.” A Sound Effect, 18 February 2021, https://www.asoundeffect.com/the-undoing-sound/. Accessed 11 May 2025.

Wired. “How This Woman Creates God of War’s Sound Effects | Obsessed | WIRED.” YouTube, Google, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFVLWo5B81w&list=PLmrT2wTGky_Slb0fWTF1sHZLZr0ZP4Omg&index=14&t=103s. Accessed 20 May 2025.