Alex Takács and Leon Vynehall Return with Dreamlike Descent in Cruel Love

Director Alex Takács and UK-based electronic producer Leon Vynehall continue their creative partnership with the music video for Cruel Love, a hallucinatory dive into identity, distortion, and strange loops of the psyche, produced by ProdCo.

Working with cinematographer and longtime collaborator, Dustin Lane, Alex crafts a film that feels like a lucid transmission from deep inside the subconscious, a place where memories, identities, and impulses blur behind poetic static.

It begins in a dilapidated building that feels part bunker, part brainstem: Leon Vynehall, alone in a cramped apartment, locking the deadbolts and putting tea on the stove. But once a dissolving tab meets his eye and a wall-mounted dream machine is deployed, we leave the room, and reality, behind.

What follows is a slow spiral into something stranger: a sci-fi chamber piece that morphs into a riddle-laced inner voyage, full of sand, shadows, and mirrored figures. At the crescendo is a surreal battle with doppelgängers rendered like a Francis Bacon painting caught mid-breath.

Alex, known for his emotionally textured work, has directed multiple videos for Vynehall. A project two years in the making, Cruel Love mirrors the diaristic tone of Vynehall’s upcoming album In Daytona Yellow (out September 19). The song itself, built on warped textures and Beau Nox’s vocal performance, becomes the soulful scaffold for Alex’s descent into an interior world.

Leon explained, “When I first started writing the album, Alex was one of the first people I spoke to about the concept and creative around the record. We’ve been discussing and plotting what we wanted to do with this video for over two years, so to finally see the vision through at this level feels cathartic. Alex is genuinely one of the most intoxicatingly innovative and creatively thorough people I’ve been around – I always learn something when we work together.”

Alex added, “Cruel Love grew out of conversations I had with Leon about the evolution of his album and the mysteries of the creative process. In every creative act there’s an element of surrender, a moment of dying to oneself so that something real and unmediated can pass through. It requires a perilous dance with shadowy inner forces that can be cultivated but never controlled.”