His chief device to lull the audience into the desired subconscious state is music, namely a continuous score by Murray Hidary, an American composer whose Mind Travel performances take audiences on “a collective journey that is at once provocative and reflective, healing and transcending”. It’s stirring stuff, but after the first few scenes of collective musical healing, you kind of wish it would stop. The relentless backdrop of heaving strings and racing piano might have been appropriate for a short trailer – and it fits with the opening scene of a parkouristbouncing off the walls of the Casa da Música, betraying the young Koolhaas’s background in music videos. Drawn out across the entire length of the film it grates, adding an air of camp melodrama to Rem’s ruminations.

It’s particularly frustrating in scenes when you really want to hear the dialogue, from Koolhaas’s conversations with artist Marina Abramović and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, to heated meetings with the partners. Instead, we get more platitudes to the strains of a melancholic cello, in which Koolhaas sounds less the radical provocateur and more like architecture’s Amélie.

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