‘Tall Tales’ movie review: Even Thom Yorke can’t save this ugly mess
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has been involved in various cinematic projects throughout his career, scoring movies like 2018’s Suspiria and 2024’s Confidenza, while also starring in a short directed by Paul Thomas Anderson in conjunction with the release of his solo album Anima. Now, he has teamed up with Jonathan Zawada, who has directed a bizarre hour-long film for his latest project, Tall Tales, made in collaboration with Mark Pritchard.
Yorke and Pritchard’s musical project – something they began creating years ago by workshopping their creations over Email and Zoom – forms the basis of the film, with Zawada’s visuals serving as a series of music video vignettes. The result is an abstract and often unnerving collection of images, some of which are thought-provoking, although they are predominantly rather ugly.
Garish colours and animations sit alongside bizarre AI-generated imagery, and you truly never know what will come next. The most memorable segment is arguably ‘Gangsters’, in which brightly-coloured individuals, some pink, some green, populate a town square while engaging in some questionable behaviour – the camera panning past everyone as though it’s examining a freak show. Here, we’re given a world that is as experimental as Yorke and Pritchard’s musical project, forcing us into an uncomfortable display of uncanny strangeness.
However, there are many moments in Tall Tales where you’ll find yourself desperately waiting for a segment to be over – Yorke and Pritchard’s music becoming the only saving grace. Later on in ‘Back in the Game’, we see AI-generated clown-like figures wearing giant heads resembling animals or people with several faces in one, and the array of neon colours and contorted masks make for a rather hideous viewing experience. These scenes don’t feel ‘ugly’ in a ‘beautiful’ way; rather, they just feel tacky, lacking in feeling, and quite soulless.
There are also segments that feel incredibly cliché, like scenes of boxes being sent round a sorting facility or images of waterfalls contrasted with online videos of random neighbourhoods, people at work, dilapidated buildings, and mountains of rubbish. We’ve seen these kinds of visual colleges before – a montage of how the world is continuously turning to shit – and it feels stale, undercutting the true beauty of the music playing above it.
Near the end of the film, we’re given a moment that feels much more soothing, with a hallucinatory effect emanating from what feels like a close-up of an abstract painting coming to life. Figures move and dissolve, and there is something beautiful about the way the camera continuously pans and floats as Yorke’s heavenly layered vocals cascade in the background.
Sadly though, much of the film consists of unsightly imagery that looks like the kind of shitty AI-generated designs you’d find on a T-shirt sold on a dud website. It’s a shame that the movie takes such an artificial and simply ugly approach to crafting visuals, because the existential beauty and despair found in Yorke’s lyrics, paired with the mixture of electronic and ambient soundscapes created by him and Pritchard, deserve much better accompaniment.
