All Too Well: The Short Film Review
By: Mallory Johnson
On November 12th, 2021, Taylor Swift released the short film that she wrote and directed for the ten-minute version of her fan favorite song All Too Well. The film stars Sadie Sink (Stranger Things, Fear Street 1978), Dylan O’Brien (Teen Wolf, Maze Runner), and Taylor Swift. Before I go any further, SPOILER ALERT. Also, trigger warnings for: gaslighting, toxic relationship, sexual content, and an age gap. The song and film tell the story of Taylor and Jake Gyllenhaal’s three-month relationship and how he broke her heart. Sadie plays a young Taylor and Dylan plays younger Jake.
One of the first things that you notice when watching the short film is the age gap, as Sadie is 19 years old, and Dylan is 30. This is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable - the relationship that the song is about had that same age difference. Taylor was 20/21 and Jake Gyllenhaal was 29/30 when they were dating. The film starts with the quote from Pablo Neruda, “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” I feel like this quote summarizes the song, relationship, and film in a nutshell. The next scene is Sadie and Dylan cuddling in bed. Sadie says, “Are you for real?” and Dylan says, “What do you mean?” and then Sadie says, “I don’t know, I just feel like maybe I made you up.” This scene is more powerful when you know that Jake gaslit her, which caused her to question her own reality. After this scene, the song starts and we see that the film is literally following the song lyrics - the couple walks through the door as the line “I walked through the door with you, the air was cold” plays. We then see Sadie take off a red scarf, which is a significant part of the song and the film. She forgets it at his sister's house, and he keeps it and refuses to return it (still). There are sections of the film with titles on the screen. They are “An upstate escape”, “The first crack in the glass,” “are you real?” “The breaking point,” “The reeling,” “thirteen years gone,” and lastly, “The remembering.” A shot I love is when Dylan and Sadie are walking through a very scenic forest and stop and kiss, and the camera does a 360 so you can see every angle. Dylan looks a lot like Jake in the music video which is crazy to me.
There is a scene with the two fighting without music in the kitchen that is heartbreaking. Sadie is mad because Dylan was ignoring her at a dinner with his friends, but Dylan is mad at her and gaslights her about it. This is when you first start seeing that their relationship is not as healthy as it seems. Also, in an interview, Taylor said that they had a script, but they improvised the scene. The varying emotions in the kitchen scene is powerful - Sadie goes from mad to sad to happy and then back to sad in a very short and brilliant way. Another one of my favorite scenes is when the two of them are “dancing in the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” I saw tweets about the lighting in this scene - Sadie is dancing by the window that uses yellow lighting, to represent her warmth, and Dylan is dancing by the fridge that uses blue lighting to represent his coldness. When the couple is breaking up, Sadie is asking him to look at her. He refuses, instead breaking up with her. We then see Sadie crying and then the camera pans back...and Dylan is finally looking at her. This is possibly referencing the fact that Jake called Taylor after they broke up and finally said that he loved her. Sadie shows off her amazing talent in the scenes where she is crying. The scene at her 21st birthday party is the scene that got me the most emotional - Jake skipped Taylor’s 21st birthday party and cheated on her instead. She wrote the song The Moment I Knew about it. Therefore, Taylor wrote and released the song 22: she was trying to make up for her ruined birthday. There is a reference to the iconic Spiderman kiss - which I believe is a reference to Jake being a villain in the current Spiderman movies. In the poetry reading scene, Taylor is reciting the first verse of All Too Well, which reflects her writing the song, releasing it, and performing it and how it became a fan favorite. The scene with Dylan outside watching the reading - while wearing the iconic red scarf - is powerful. It proves that he remembers it all too well too.
Overall, I LOVED this short film. It provides an interesting look into the relationship in a beautiful way. The acting is phenomenal, and I love that Taylor both wrote and directed it. I give it a strong 10/10 and hope there are more short films to come!