If you’re still not over the 10-minute-long version of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” off her newly released Red (Taylor’s Version), the singer has just released a short film to accompany the track.
As previously reported, the film was written and directed by Taylor. It stars Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink and former Teen Wolf star Dylan O’Brien; Taylor plays an older version of Sadie’s character.
The video begins with a quote from poet Pablo Neruda: “Love is so short; forgetting is so long.” It then follows Dylan and Sadie’s unnamed characters from the dizzying heights of their new romance, through the strains on their relationship, to their devastating breakup and, finally, her acceptance.
Each scene is set off by titles like “The First Crack in the Glass,” “The Breaking Point,” “The Reeling,” and “The Remembering.” Much of the specific imagery in Taylor’s song appears in the video, from the now-infamous scarf to scenes of “dancing ’round the kitchen in the refrigerator light.”
There’s an interlude where the music stops and Dylan and Sadie’s characters argue, hurling f-bombs at each other, as she accuses him of acting like a different person around his friends, who are all “much older” than she is, while he accuses her of imagining it.
The end of the video is introduced by the title “13 Years Gone,” and we see that Sadie’s character, now older and wiser, has become an author and written a book called All Too Well. As she does a reading at a book store, a man is seeing looking at her through the window…wearing the infamous scarf.
“All Too Well,” a fan-favorite deep cut, has long been rumored to be about Taylor’s short-lived romance with actor Jake Gyllenhaal in 2010, when she was 20 and he was 29. In previously-unheard lyrics of the 10-minute version, we get a sense of what might have caused their breakup.
“You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine/And that made me want to die,” Taylor sings on the track. Another lyric goes, “And I was never good at telling jokes but the punch line goes/I’ll get older but your lovers stay my age.”
Taylor hinted that the video was full of Easter eggs, so Swifties…have at it.
(Video contains uncensored profanity.)
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