On the Nature of Daylight

31 July 2025

The videoclip of On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter is a beautiful sequence in which we’re participating in the emotional journey of a woman, wonderfully played by Elisabeth Moss, walking in a desolated city .

The video opens with a scene of a bird held into a man’s hands which seem to be an act of care at first but it could also be a metaphor to describe the emotional state in which the woman appears to be. As viewers, we don’t know who called her or why but it is not relevant to the story. The video doesn’t narrate a sequence of events but instead it portrays a consuming moment of pain and sadness.

As the woman leaves the restaurant, she embarks in a deep internal voyage to which we can immediately relate to. She is so inside her feelings that the cold city around her becomes just a group of blurred shapes and lights. Even though we know nothing about her, we’re participating in her journey. It has happened to all of us to be holding up tears while being in a public setting.

It’s strange to feel sad and lonely in a city with people and things happening around because the internal conflict you have inside doesn’t match your surroundings. Thanks to the melancholic, repetitive and absorbing music and the cinematography we see her emotions reflected on the landscape. It creates a poetic and artistic emotional dimension in which she navigates through.

It’s a crescendo of sensations that ends with the woman bursting into tears after holding them up for the whole time. As she starts crying we feel both the peak of her pain and her release of tensions accumulated through time.