Everything I Hate About You

A dingy motel room is transformed into a bloody murder scene in the music video for NOANNE’s Everything I Hate About You, an energetic ode to complicated situationships. While the video is well shot and matches the charmingly macabre vibe of the song, it’s hard to deny that the concept could have been pushed further to become truly memorable.

Everything I Hate About You opens with the main character of the video and singer NOANNE sitting in a motel chair, holding a pistol with silencer attached, the walls coated in blood stains. The video cuts between the singer and a motel cleaner, slowly making his way through each room, where particular attention is given to each room number climbing higher and higher. It’s a fun Hitchcock-esque interplay between the two characters; she’s revelling in the afterglow of violence, meanwhile a humble cleaner gets closer to discovering what she’s done. Unfortunately, the rich potential for drama is undercut by a number of factors. While director Steen Agro has chosen to focus on the room numbers, the audience is crucially unaware of which room NOANNE’s crime has taken place in. The ticking clock is thereby rendered useless; how can the audience know exactly how close the cleaner is to NOANNE’s bloody motel room without a frame of reference? Without knowing the room number that the music video largely takes place in, there’s no effect in seeing the room numbers going higher and higher. The destination may as well be the moon.

A more glaring disappointment is the lack of a payoff or resolution to the cleaner entering the bloodied room. This is the moment the video has been building up to, and it fails to deliver any kind of shocking, comedic, or dramatic punchline. Perhaps the cleaner could have looked at the bloody scene and reacted nonchalantly, shrugged and continued with their job, suggesting that this kind of violence is less out of the ordinary than the audience expects. Alternatively, NOANNE’s character could have been caught unawares, her singing and dancing interrupted while the camera lingered on the cleaner’s bewildered reaction, the door closing slowly in a comedic beat. These suggestions are hardly the most interesting or inspired ideas, but they represent what I consider the film’s largest misstep. What should have been the climax of the video’s narrative falls entirely flat, which is a shame considering this is where the director could have been at their most expressive.

The song has a pounding energy, and the video represents this intensity well for the most part. Agro keeps the camera moving constantly, never pausing to rest. NOANNE’s performance is mostly delivered to the camera, and she does well to personify the raw emotion of the song. Aiding the camp grotesque tone of the song is the playfully morbid set design; bloody handprints and machetes dripping with gore sell the idea of NOANNE’s murderous infatuation with the song’s subject. And yet, the horror imagery could have been pushed further. The video starts at 100 and sadly stays there, failing to build upon the admittedly strong visuals that it opens with. The full extent of blood and gore could have been built up slower, or perhaps there could have been more viscera for NOANNE to use for props. Of course there’s always the possibility that this would have made the video less palatable to some audiences. Playing it safer however results in a video that doesn’t build to much beyond what the audience see in the first 30 seconds.

NOANNE has stated that the song ‘delves into the complexities of love, hatred, and the blurred lines between the two’. I can understand where hatred is represented in the video, but I fail to see how love is represented anywhere. It feels less like the soap-opera dark comedy of Death Becomes Her and more like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, lacking either the lurid sex appeal or gritty violence that the song sounds like it’s aiming for. Maybe it would have been fun to see NOANNE caress the dismembered leg of her ex-lover, or to see her use bloody intestines for a feather boa. The video has more than enough room for more creative uses of the premise, and it’s a shame that the final result was as straightforward and clinical as it was.

While there are some missed opportunities in my mind for Everything I Hate About You, the music video largely does its job in accompanying the song acceptably. Does it play it too safe? Absolutely. The narrative of the video could have been far more memorable, and overall it risks portraying NOANNE as bland, without much of a voice of her own. Still, the video is watchable, it looks good, and, perhaps in contrary to the filmmaker’s assertion, is largely inoffensive.