Taylor Swift shattered hearts the morning of November 12, when she released the highly anticipated 10-minute version of “All Too Well.” And the emotional hits keep coming: At 7 p.m. E.T. the evening of the 12th, she released a short film to accompany the song.
I don’t even want to say much else besides that. Go ahead and watch it, below, then we can discuss.
Taylor Swift announced the “All Too Well” short film in early November. “Shot on 35mm film with cinematography by the brilliant @the_rinayang. Plan your watch parties or grab your blanket and curl up into a ball,” she wrote on Instagram the day before its release.
The film stars Swift, Sadie Sink (19 years old), and Dylan O’Brien (30 years old). Sink and O’Brien’s age difference has been the subject of much chatter online. Fans believe it confirms the song and film are about Swift’s early-2010s relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal. (They got together when Swift was 19 and Gyllenhaal was 28.)
New lyrics in the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” suggest this too, namely, “You said if we had been closer in age / Maybe it would’ve been fine / And that made me want to die.”
On the topic of Red in general, Swift wrote on Instagram, “Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.”