Want to know what it feels like to have a manic episode? Watch Sia”s new spellbinding video for “Chandelier.”
The video, shot in a grungy, largely empty run-down apartment with strange drawings – the kind we”re used to seeing perps live in in episodes of “Law & Order”- features 11-year old Maddie Ziegler (from “Dance Moms”), dressed in a nude leotard and a blonde page boy wig, who is meant to be a young Sia.
As the song and the lyrics about wanting to hang from the chandelier and not being able to wait until the night unspool, the young girl dances throughout the apartment in a manic modern movements that are both extraordinary and disturbing. She stops to pantomime to eat, with a dead-eyed stare, and then continues her kinetic motions throughout the apartment.
Shot largely without edits, there are single shots that follow the girl into different rooms. The dancing is remarkable but so is the sensation the girl gives of just barely being in control as her feelings begin to overwhelm her to where she is, literally, at times crawling up the walls. It”s haunting and eerie and compelling.
The song, the first single from Sia's upcoming “1000 Forms of Fear,” still sounds too much like Rihanna”s “Diamonds,” which Sia co-wrote, and her vocal performance on the first verse is a complete replica of Ri-Ri”s, but the video gives the tune that extra dimension that if you sit still and watch it from start to finish and concentrate on the lyrics with the visual is sure to give you goosebumps and a new appreciation for what Sia and her co-director Daniel Askill did here.