Before Bugonia drops this fall, Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos have one more deeply strange, quietly affecting collaboration up their sleeves: the music video for “Beth’s Farm,” the first single off Jerskin Fendrix’s upcoming album Once Upon a Time… in Shropshire. It’s six minutes of cryptic rituals, dirt-streaked melancholy, and burnt offerings — which is to say, it’s pure Lanthimos.
The short film stars Fendrix and Stone as a pair of rural wanderers on a farm where the animals have inexplicably turned to mud. To resurrect them, they burn relics from a forgotten past. Or maybe they don’t. Lanthimos doesn’t offer answers — just stunning, bizarre visuals that skirt the line between the pastoral and the apocalyptic. Stone, by now fully fluent in the filmmaker’s stylized language, leans into the wordless surrealism with total control. It’s as if she’s lived in this weird little corner of his imagination for years. Because she has.
But while the filmmaker’s touch is unmistakable, the project ultimately belongs to Fendrix — a rising composer whose cinematic soundscapes have quietly become Lanthimos’s secret weapon. He broke through scoring Poor Things and earned an Oscar nomination for it. He followed that with Kinds of Kindness and the upcoming Bugonia, whose score includes a 90-piece orchestra and, according to Fendrix, “a big fucking sound.” But Shropshire, his second solo album, is where his heart lives.
Raised in the English countryside, Fendrix (born Joscelin Dent-Pooley) channels his memories of Shropshire into something both idyllic and cracked. He describes the album as “a love letter to something that once existed — a shining, rose-tinted childhood and the lives that made it.” “Beth’s Farm,” in particular, is drawn from teenage days spent drinking in cornfields, watching the sunset, blasting Kanye West through a Bluetooth speaker. That bliss, of course, doesn’t last.
The album is steeped in loss. While writing it, Fendrix experienced the deaths of a close friend and his father. His process became both isolating and excruciating — recording vocals alone in a small studio, pushing his voice to its edge. “Some takes felt like self-punishment,” he says. But the result is a collection that’s as emotionally unstable as grief itself: chaotic, tender, absurd, and oddly euphoric. It spans post-rock, chamber pop, ballads, and group singalongs around a family piano. It’s also, somehow, a deeply English album — tea-stained and rain-swept, full of ghosts and wildflowers.
Fendrix calls the music “kaleidoscopically beautiful,” with death as the central motif. “We’re taught by Hollywood that grief is strings and sadness and a slow fade. That’s not true. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s worse than you imagined.” Beth’s Farm embodies that contradiction: a video where animals are mud, memories are flames, and Emma Stone walks barefoot through the ruins of something sacred.
In a year when Bugonia is poised to be the big, bold swing from the Lanthimos-Stone-Fendrix trifecta, this smaller project hits in a different way. It’s raw. It’s tender. And it’s deeply weird. Watch it once. Then again. Then maybe never again. You’ll still carry it with you.
Once Upon a Time… in Shropshire releases October 10 via Untitled (Recs).