Just hours after the release of her 10th studio album, Midnights, Taylor Swift unveiled the first music video from the set. The self-directed clip is a horror-comedy that, at turns, evokes Michel Gondry’s sci-fi romantic drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It also marks a sharp pivot from the more solemn introspection of Folklore and Evermore and back toward a more characteristically tongue-in-cheek variety of self-deprecation.
In the video, Swift’s “nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts” play out as she’s haunted by her ghosts in a house smothered in garish vintage decor (pretty sure we all had that orange-and-brown floral wallpaper in our kitchen in the 1980s!). Swift is rescued by her pop-star alter ego, who’s both more fashionable and better equipped to hold her liquor.
A funeral scene in which Swift’s future family members—played by Mike Birbiglia, John Early, and Mary Elizabeth Ellis, who’s dressed like the singer circa 2009—squabble over her will is funny and clever, with references to Swift’s penchant for “secret encoded message[s] that [mean] something else.” At over a minute-and-a-half, the bit overstays its welcome but ends on a riotous note—literally.
Listen to “Anti-Hero” below:
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Hey, Sal. You are a racist POS.