FILM REVIEW: Tall Tales
An Immersive Cinematic Experience That Dances Between the Dreamlike and the Dystopian
Presented in collaboration with WARP RECORDS,
“TALL TALES” – a spectacular visual and audio
experience – will screen globally in cinemas for one night
only on May 8, 2025 – the day before the album’s release.
Tall Tales isn’t just a film — it’s an experience, a hypnotic fusion of sound and vision crafted by three extraordinary talents: legendary producer Mark Pritchard, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and visionary visual artist Jonathan Zawada. Over a decade in the making, this collaboration unfolds like a digital-age fairy tale, offering an arresting meditation on modern life and its paradoxes.
From the first frame, Tall Tales presents itself as a visual feast. Iridescent skies, robotic limbs, crumbling kingdoms, and surreal natural landscapes drift across the screen in a continuous flow of hyperreal imagery. Zawada’s direction conjures a world that is at once beautiful and unsettling — an uneasy blend of the organic and artificial that reflects our own age of anxiety.
The sonic world is just as rich. Pritchard draws from his mastery of analog synths and vintage machinery, weaving lush, textured soundscapes that are both grounding and otherworldly. Over this, Thom Yorke’s spectral vocals float like chants from a parallel dimension. There’s a haunting familiarity in his voice — an echo of OK Computer-era Radiohead — but here, Yorke leans fully into experimental storytelling, his lyrics cryptic and prophetic.
What makes Tall Tales so captivating is its seamless integration of all elements — sound, voice, and visual — into a singular, immersive experience. There’s no traditional narrative, but a clear emotional arc emerges. The film critiques our pursuit of technological progress, asking whether the machines we built to serve us have instead begun to shape our art, our perception, and our dreams.
This is not a passive film to watch — it’s a work to absorb. Best experienced in cinemas. Tall Tales encourages us to surrender to its rhythm and riddle. It doesn’t offer easy answers, but it will leave you pondering long after the final note fades.
In short, Tall Tales is a stunning, genre-defying achievement. It is equal parts futuristic fable and cautionary tale — and perhaps most of all, a reminder of what art can be when boundaries are not just blurred, but boldly erased.
Check you cinemas in each state.
Rating: ★★★★
