If thirty years ago it had been announced that Tim Burton was going to direct the new music video for a pop star – I don’t know, Madonna or Whitney Houston – it would have been a world event. Today, Burton directing a Lady Gaga clip is as if Amenábar made a video for Mónica Naranjo. Well okay.
After more than a decade of successful (in pecuniary terms) tenure at Disney, stamping his aesthetic stamp on soulless reproductions like a yawning Dalí of the 21st century, ‘The Dead Dance’ could have been a good opportunity for Burton to let down his (gothic) hair a little and do something reminiscent of the very personal filmmaker who dazzled in the nineties. Well neither.
‘The Dead Dance’ is like a listless, bland version of John Landis and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, presented with the attractive visual style and Caribbean island atmosphere of ‘I Walked with a Zombie’ (1943).
Filmed on the “island of the dolls” in Mexico (a place full of dolls hung for years by a local “collector”, converted into a tourist attraction), the video shows the New York singer characterized as a Victorian doll that comes to life as if she had symptoms of Parkinson’s.
From that premise, the narrative does not go much further. What could have been a crazy gathering of dolls dancing as if possessed, has ended up turning out to be an endless Halloween-esque choreography, punctuated with shots of dolls coming to life (some with a rather crappy use of animation) that are supposedly sinister/fun. Neither one thing nor the other.
