It is a far cry from the typical Hollywood use of music. Ms. Fleming said that she tends to think of opera in film as “something incredibly romantic,” pointing to the role “La Bohème” plays in “Moonstruck” or “La Traviata” in “Pretty Woman.” But she agreed that classical music had been adopted by quite a few cinematic bad guys recently. “It’s the villains who are the most in control in their villainy who tend to be classical music fans,” she observed.

The cinematic trope that classical music is somehow villainous has dismayed some in the field. The critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that the “tendency to associate classical music with murderous insanity is a curious neurosis of the American pop-cultural psyche.”

And the pianist Jeremy Denk, an acclaimed interpreter of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” once wrote for NPR about the use of Bach in “Silence of the Lambs” to accompany a scene of Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism. It was “certainly one of the best face-chewing scenes I can think of,” Mr. Denk wrote wryly, even as he called its use of the music exploitative.

“Cunning, evil directors almost always use classical music as an ironic foil, a tool for dissociation,” Mr. Denk wrote. “This perpetuates a stereotype: Classical music is unnatural. It is not the music for normal events; it’s for massacres and deceptions of the soul (“Apocalypse Now,” “Clockwork Orange,” the end of “There Will Be Blood”).”

Making a film like “Bel Canto” in an age of irony gave pause to its director, Paul Weitz, who co-directed with his brother Chris “About a Boy” and “American Pie,” and got a feel for the classical music world while working on the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle.”