The fellow Bad Seeds create a haunting score to director David Olehoffen’s prize-winning picture.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have announced the release of their original soundtrack to Loin Des Hommes (Far From Men), a French film adaptation of Albert Camus’ short story The Guest.

Using intertwining piano and violin melodies, soft drones and subtle electronics, Cave and Ellis paint a minimal and mesmerising backdrop to the ghostly frontier towns and empty desert vistas pictured in Olehoffen’s movie, which stars Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb in a tale of colonial conflict in Algeria.

“Very often a tension can happen between music and picture that is about chance and a kind of unknowingness that can be really amazing,” says Cave of the collaboration. “Just by putting together two things that were created in isolation, music and film, suddenly something quite magical can happen.”

The soundtrack adds to Cave and Ellis’s many previous film collaborations, including their music for 2005’s Australian outback western The Proposition, which was scripted by Cave, 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and 2009’s The Road, among several others.

The Loin Des Hommes soundtrack is out on Goliath Enterprises on May 18 on CD, LP and digitally and can be pre-order from iTunes, Amazon and the usual places. The film itself has only been released in France so far, but will hopefully get wider distribution soon after playing at festivals last year.