Sia released a new video today starring actor Shia LaBeouf, most famous for wearing a paper bag on his head, and Maddie Ziegler, most famous for starring in Lifetime’s reality show Dance Moms, who became big, big news when she starred in Sia’s blockbuster video for “Chandelier.” Here Maddie reprises her role, looking like a young Tavi Gevinson, but instead of flinging herself around a derelict building with choreographed abandon, she finds herself trapped in an enormous bird cage with a half-naked Shia LaBeouf in dirty Depends, which frankly sounds as unwanted and unpleasant as the next installment of Saw.
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Given it’s streamlined narrative and one set location, it’s anything but boring, in fact, it’s actually impossible to tear your eyes from. Their movements are by turns elegant, feral, and fantastic; the relationship between the two both puzzling and heartbreaking. For a while Maddie really kicks the shit out of him, but does so as if Reagan from The Exorcist was both a ballet dancer and an MMA enthusiast. Meanwhile Shia’s busy channeling Caesar from Planet of the Apes. As for the song, it’s everything we’ve come to expect from Sia: a bold, slickly tooled, electro-pop juggernaut that manages to balance on that knife’s edge between genuinely emotive and histrionic.
Watch the video above and below are a few things I thought while doing just that:
1. Smelling someone’s fingers is never OK.
2. The face I pull when someone tries to pick food off my plate before I’m done.
3. Really glad someone took Sadako’s moves (you know her – the tiny terror from Japanese horror flick, Ringu) and worked them into a music video. Before I just associated that crazy-crawly, looking-evil-through-your-hair move with a little girl creeping out of a TV coming to kill me. Or someone with food poisoning desperately clawing their way towards the toilet. Both scary. Now I associate it with Sia LaBeouf! Yes, Sia LaBeouf!
4. Tom Hanks, is that you?
5. While we’re on the subject of movies: this deleted scene in The Exorcist is surely an inspiration.
6. Those stains will never come out.
7. Male-female relations summarised in two frames.
8. In which Shia attempts to recreate that seminal scene in Cruel Intentions when Reese Witherspoon charms Ryan Phillippe by being goofy and carefree, after which he realizes he’s actually IN LOVE with Witherspoon’s character and OMG the stakes of this silly bet just went SKY HIGH. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character is about to get so PISSED.
9. #acting
10. Dude you don’t need to go on the Paleo diet to fit through those bars. YOU CAN DO IT. BREAK FREE! Oh, this is like a mental block thing? Gotcha. Bummer.
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