Stunning and dark film-noir inspired music video for Iceage

With its shadowy narrative, a disquieting undertone of suggested violence and sexuality and unflinching portraiture, the stunning new video for Danish band Iceage’s solemn and equally uncomfortable song Against the Moon is a fantastically haunting apportion of film noir tropes.

The video was directed by Kim Thue and Martin Masai Andersen, and stars Dan van Husen – the German actor whose CV boasts such strange and twisted films as Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre.

For this video, van Husen brings the disturbing aesthetics of such works and weaves them through his performance as a lone man making his way through a barren landscape with, apparently, an equally barren soul.

It’s a deliberately cryptic and unsettling narrative, remaining true to its film noir influences with suggestions of violent endings and stony-faced, de-sensualised sexuality. We meet the blank eyes of a jaded woman staring into the camera, chewing gum as her nightie falls from her shoulders onto her heavily scarred arms. In another scene, her tongue dances in flames.

Martin says: “We drift in and out of the past and present as the film deals with the ideas of repentance or lack thereof, as the lyrics suggest.” The video is quietly terrifying, very poignant and very ambiguous, making for wonderful, if uncomfortable viewing.

The final scene shows the old man wearily walking through a dilapidated trailerpark, as though turning his back not only on the scene, but on life itself.