As Alt-J never appears in the music video of their song, "Breezeblocks," the audience is left to watch is a truly engaging and emotional short film. The video itself depicts a series of violent events resulting in a murder. The film's characters consist of a female who is being held captive, a male who is wed to the captive woman, and another female who is presented in the end as the married woman's captor.
The most intriguing aspect of this music video is that the storyline is presented in reverse. This way of video formatting entices the audience and leaves them questioning what the true storyline is at every turn.
The first scene of this music video takes place in an apartment bathroom with a full tub of water. The first main character in the storyline (female) is shown dead submerged in the tub, held down by a cinderblock or in european terms, a 'breekeblock' (hinting to the song title). In the next shot, there is a close up of another main character (male) sitting in a fetal position, with his head resting in the cups of his hands. His body language suggests extreme stress or sadness, and quite possibly regret. Additionally, in this shot we can see a gold-band ring on his left hand ring finger suggesting that he is married. In another shot returning to the submerged female, there is no apparent ring, further suggesting that this deceased female is not his wife. The third shot in this bathroom scene shows these two main characters having a physical fight, resulting in the male smashing in the female's head with a cinderblock.
The second scene takes place in the hallway of the same apartment. Here, the two main characters are fighting each other and the female is seen struggling and desperately running away from the male.
Scene three shows the main female character looking terrified as she and the male character fight over a cinderblock followed by the female aggressively throwing a glass wine bottle from the counter at the male character. The battle between characters moves through different acts of violence including brutally rolling over the kitchen counter and slamming into bookcases.
The fourth scene introduces a third character (female) who seems to be locked in a wardrobe with a piece of duct tape covering her mouth which the male character takes off as she begins to scream while looking terrified past him towards the front door. A close up shot of the third character shows her attempting to frantically cut herself out of her rope-bound hands with a knife. In this shot we see that she is wearing a matching wedding band to the male character, suggesting that she is his wife. In the following shot, we see a glimpse of the primary female character entering the apartment, looking down upon the male character and his wife suggesting that she does not approve of the situation. This is a key part of the video where we as viewers can assume that the male character is not the bad guy, but rather trying to save his wife from her female captor.
The fifth scene shows the male character coming in through the door, and leaving it open behind him. This suggests that he is in a hurry, which is emphasized by him dropping his jacket to the floor to open up the wardrobe.
Throughout the video, the camera focuses on a number of items in the apartment in slow motion to break away from the action and yet again leave the viewer actively asking questions.
Overall, the graveness of the succession of violent events can be foreseen at the very first because of the dark hue of the camera shots. Every scene is very dark and severely lacking in color which is an excellent signifier that whatever is happening in the video is dark - both metaphorically and otherwise.
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