That’s actress Sienna Miller in a hospital gown hugging a skeleton, and her role in a new music video only gets more disturbing. At seven minutes long, it’s more like a movie short and is nothing short of brilliant. The song called “See the Light” is the new release from an upcoming album by boundary-pushing UK band, The Hours. With an A-list of supporters backing their music and this raw and intense video directed by Tony Kaye (American History X), The Hours’ time has come.

Miller flushes vanity down the toilet for this video exposing a tortured soul. Trapped in a glass case full of Prada purses, she spends the first verse of the song trying to escape the store. Emotions ravage her as she flings shoes, stretches out on shelves and screams for help. Barefoot and afraid she breaks free and runs through the streets winding up on a shrink’s couch. Cigarette in hand she proclaims, “Death feels like the safest place for me right now.”

Damien Hirst is the video’s art director, and his paintings appear throughout (he is a longtime friend and champion of the band). Similar to Hirst’s ultra-controversial Mother and Child Divided, when he bisected and pickled a cow and a calf in the name of art, Miller finds herself in a gallery full of disemboweled holsteins. The carcasses hang head to toe dripping blood on the floor. Miller covers her hands and feet in it making sad prints on the walls. “Drugs quiet the war,” she says grotesquely.

The light haunts Sienna Miller as she succumbs to the unremitting grip of a complete breakdown. She trashes a hospital room before crawling like a lost puppy on a dark, dark country road. “Break open my head then and fix it,” she says fully withdrawn. “I just feel panicked and sick and full of dread. It’s about time I faced the truth. Somewhere within all of the darkness there is light, and I need to find it.”

The Hours never make an appearance in the video, yet the music rises and falls just as powerfully as Miller’s character. Hirst’s chilling art and Kaye’s gripping direction combine in the most perfectly twisted explosion of gratuity and voyeurism. The Hours lead singer Antony (Ant) Genn says, “It’s a song about struggle and addiction and fear and darkness … and these guys have brought it to life; the song and the film work perfectly together, it’s band on.”

Written by: Ben Bamsey
Artworks Magazine: Spring 2009