It wasn’t enough for the Killers to release a second music video for “Miss Atomic Bomb” earlier this week, itself a sequel to the “Mr. Brightside” clip from 2005. Or to share the totally funny “I Feel It in My Bones” holiday short featuring an evil Santa Claus only seven days before that. Now, Battle Born ballad “Here With Me” has a video unto itself as well and despite the onslaught of footage, it isn’t a throwaway live clip or studio session (here’s looking at you, Green Day) — not hardly. Tim Burton directs, Submarine‘s Craig Roberts stars, and Winona Ryder supports.
As our own Barry Walters explained in his review of the album, this song is “a tearjerker written by [Brandon] Flowers and Travis frontman Fran Healy in the mould of, yes, Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is.’ The singer pines for his lost love, but when he spots her at a restaurant, he can’t bear a confrontation, and turns tail.” Indeed, we see that scene played out here, but under entirely different circumstances than Flowers probably initially imagined. Roberts’ creepy little character falls in love with a figure from a wax museum that he sees as a very living Ryder. He steals her body and takes her to the beach, dances with her in the rococo theater that the Killers are playing, even makes her dinner at his home. And that’s when things get really weird.
