Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos can’t stop, won’t stop. The duo’s latest collaboration is the music video for “Beth’s Farm” from Once Upon A Time… in Shropshire, the sophomore album of Jerskin Fendrix. Fendrix is also among Lanthimos’ stable of talent, having scored his three most recent films. As you’d expect from this artistic coterie, the “Beth’s Farm” video is quirky and warm but also surreal and somewhat unsettling. We call that the Lanthimos sweet spot!
Per a release, the video “explores the song’s themes of loss, sentimentality and bittersweet childhood nostalgia” through a strange, somewhat Kafka-esque tale of a farmer who wakes up to find all his livestock transformed into breathing piles of mulch. He then summons the impish Emma Stone with a flare gun, and she comes to the farm to help him complete a mysterious ritual involving fire, bits of their DNA, and dancing in order to bring the animals back. Stone then returns back from whence she came and the farm returns to normal—except for a twist ending that indicates the melancholy magic is still at work.
“Beth’s Farm” marks the sixth collaboration between Stone and Lanthimos in the last seven years, following The Favourite, the short film Bleat, Poor Things, Kinds Of Kindness, and the upcoming Bugonia. Fendrix has been part of the team since Poor Things, having attracted Lanthimos’ attention with his 2020 debut album Winterreise. Fendrix wrote Once Upon A Time… In Shropshire between work on the film scores. “When you write a song, it has to be self-evident, stand up, justify itself. There’s a lot of pressure on it. So writing scores for someone else’s story—it’s a great exercise in empathy,” the artist said in a press release. “I was furnishing these other characters’ emotional journeys. So it’s a really different way of thinking.”
In his own statement, Lanthimos said, “It was lovely to team up again with Emma and a number of people that we have been working with for quite a while to contribute a bit of film narrative to what I think is a remarkable second personal album by our very important artistic collaborator and friend, Jerskin Fendrix.”
