Deep, dark and beautifully disturbing, The Owl, a music video for I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, is a perfectly constructed moment of desperation. Tied down at the ankle, a frantic crow struggles to reach freedom as pop culture’s lipstick and fast food containers fly past. Looming in the background, an owl watches with a calm intensity—we never know its true intentions. The crow, typically thought of as one of nature’s most clever creatures, is here shown in its last moments of desperation.

In this surrealist masterpiece, Ho has reconstructed the psychological state of desperation using every means of image, sound, and motion. The framed compositions are dynamically stunning, always drawing strong contrasts; black to white, extreme distance to extreme close-up, fast frenetic movement to slow calming movement.

Emannuel Ho is from Winnipeg (Canada). Little else is publicly known about him. This video was created for the music label, Secretly Canadian. Check out Ho’s website for more animations by one of Canada’s best secrets