At this point, you’re either in or out on Yorgos Lanthimos. The Greek filmmaker broke out with 2009’s Dogtooth, a warped and unsettling portrait of family, but a string of collaborations with Emma Stone turned him into a mainstream hitmaker who has never shed his weird side. After costarring in The Favourite, Stone went on to lead Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, the black-and-white short film Bleat, and the upcoming Bugonia, a retelling of Save the Green Planet that looks just as stylized and askew as the previous realities they’ve conjured together. But before Bugonia arrives later this year, the pair somehow found time to produce another short film: the music video for “Beth’s Farm.”
“Beth’s Farm” is the latest single from composer Jerskin Fendrix, who wrote the scores for Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and Bugonia. The song, one of the many tracks off Fendrix’s upcoming album Once Upon A Time. . . In Shropshire, stars the musician and Stone as a pair of farmers who find their animals transformed into piles of mud. Together, they burn relics of the past in order to renew the flocks with lifeforce. Or something like that? In true Lanthimos fashion, the cryptic narrative maneuvers and bold images lend themselves to plenty of readings of the six-minute fantasy short. In press notes, Fendrix describes Once Upon A Time. . . In Shropshire “as a love letter to something that once existed — a shining, rose-tinted childhood and the lives that made it,” and the album “posits that grief is complex and memory is intoxicating.” Do with that as you will.
Watching the video for “Beth’s Farm” is the perfect appetizer for Bugonia, and a welcome reminder that Lanthimos is always gonna Lanthimos. Like Wes Anderson, the filmmaker operates in his own love-it-or-hate-it post-modern lane. Stone seems to be living for it, and is capable of clicking into whatever graphic vision the live-action cartoonist is cooking up next. It helps that “Beth’s Farm” is full of melancholy falsetto, backed by reverberating strings, making it a cinematic indie tune that triggers my Sufjan Stevens-loving heart. We love a sad bop.
“Art is often so one-dimensionally geared towards death,” Fendrix said in the notes. “Death is really, really, really complex. Sometimes it can be funny, and sometimes it’s kind of trivial, or relieving, or infuriating. I needed it to have all of that.”
Watch and listen to “Beth’s Farm” above, and keep an eye out for Once Upon A Time. . . In Shropshire when it arrives Oct. 10 — just a few weeks before Bugonia.
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