Supervised jointly by Richard King and Hans Zimmer, the sound and musical score of Dunkirk underlies the elaboration of a complex narrative, articulated around three distinct spatiotemporal units: one week on the mole, one day at sea, one hour in the air. The events that occur within each narrative space follow their own chronology; however, throughout the narration, crossings take place between the characters, and correspondences of situations are established. The action comes in the present – a ubiquitous present, constantly renewed – in a temporality dilated by the emotional and sensory load conveyed by the soundtrack. We will show that Dunkirk’s sound and musical design responds to a clear desire to combine historical realism and immersive spectacle, in a resolutely innovative and experimental approach. Besides the fact that the sound power seems to grow indefinitely according to the events met by the young English soldier, the strength and originality of this hybrid composition lie in the complementarity and the interweaving of a priori disparate components, such as the chromaticism, the pulsation given by the ticking of a watch, the sinister groan of boats swallowed by the sea, or the first measures of Edward Elgar’s “Nimrod” variation.