Lydia Tár's conducting works because of neurological mirroring, not because of who she is as a person.
The film knows this—and it proves it by showing us exactly how entrainment works, from the inside.
Watch the rehearsal sequences: the camera holds on her hands, her minute postural shifts, the way the orchestra's body language synchronizes to micro-movements she isn't consciously controlling. That's entrainment.
The film's catastrophe isn't that Tár becomes abusive and loses her gift. It's that she believes the two are connected. Notice the scene where she conducts Mahler after the harassment allegations surface—her technique is identical, the orchestra responds identically, but she experiences it as hollow.
Field captures this through sound design, not dialogue—the Mahler rehearsal is sonically perfect but emotionally dead precisely because Tár is now present in the room in a way she never was before, monitoring herself, and self-awareness is the actual poison.
Pull up the Mahler rehearsal scene (1:38:00-1:42:30) and compare the orchestra's physical synchronization to the earlier Beethoven rehearsal, then read Daniel Goleman's 'Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence' (2013) on mirror neurons in performance—the actual neuroscience Tár documents but refuses to name.
Listen to Todd Field's extended interview on 'The Filmmaker's Podcast' (2023) where he discusses why he cast a conductor rather than an actor—his insistence that the conducting sequences had to be neurologically *real* because the whole film hinges on what happens when that authenticity becomes consciously performed.