Olivia Rodrigo’s Channels Frida Kahlo In Her New Video
In “the cure,” Rodrigo seems to draw inspiration from one of the surrealist’s famous paintings
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Olivia Rodrigo's visual universe is getting more sophisticated by the single. Her new track "the cure" — the second release from her upcoming album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love — arrives with a five-minute video directed by Cat Solen and Jamie Gerin that starts as kitschy early-2000s whimsy and lands somewhere far darker. Rodrigo plays a nurse racing to develop an antidote for shriveling grey hearts, but the experiment turns on her: red strings begin erupting from her fingertips, her body slowly coming undone in a sequence that reads less pop video, more body horror.
The Kahlo Connection
The climax hits with real art-historical weight. As Rodrigo lies on a hospital bed, those crimson strings stretch from her heart to six boxed hearts arranged around her — each one tied with a bow. According to Harper's Bazaar, the scene is a direct visual echo of Frida Kahlo's Henry Ford Hospital (1932), a raw self-portrait of Kahlo in a blood-stained bed, six red veins extending from her body to six symbolic objects: a fetus, a snail, an orchid, a pelvic bone, a steel medical device, and an anatomical teaching model. The painting is rooted in Kahlo's grief over her reproductive losses following a devastating bus accident — the veins representing her desperate attempt to stay connected to parts of herself that felt irretrievably damaged. Kahlo revisited the motif in The Two Fridas (1939), where two mirrored self-portraits are bound by a single exposed vein, one heart rotting, the other intact — a meditation on fractured identity and unending pain.
The reference isn't decorative. Rodrigo's lyrics make the metaphor earn its keep: "My head is full of poison / and my heart is full of doubt / I got toxins in my bloodstream / you tried hard to suck 'em out." The song interrogates the delusion of thinking another person could be your cure for loneliness — a very 2025 kind of heartbreak, reportedly aimed at actor Louis Partridge. The Surrealist hospital setting isn't a mood board flex; it's the only logical container for this level of melodic, self-aware devastation.
This is a different emotional register than "drop dead," her first single, which went full Marie Antoinette revenge fantasy — directed by Petra Collins, shot at Versailles, laced with The Cure references and Sofia Coppola energy. That one weaponized glamour. "the cure" turns inward. The early-aughts naive aesthetic — think Wes Anderson stop-motion, Michel Gondry's handmade sets — gives way to something genuinely unsettling, which is the point. The aesthetic vocabulary here isn't borrowed; it's metabolized.
Rodrigo isn't alone in looking to women Surrealists for visual language right now — Madonna showed up to the Met Gala in a look lifted straight from Leonora Carrington's The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1945) — but few artists are making the connection feel this earned. When the references do the emotional heavy lifting the lyrics can't, that's when pop becomes something more.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
