At just sixteen Lorde has accomplished the impressive feat of topping the UK, US and NZ alternative charts, with the video for her single “Royals” being exactly what you would expect from a 16-year-old.

Vapid and self-obsessed, Lorde‰’s video does little to engage its viewers. It spends the vast majority of its runtime showing Lorde lip syncing her lyrics in front of blank white walls. She doesn‰’t change her outfit or extremely winged eyeliner and the camera takes no chances, focusing on shots only from “attractive‰” angles and distances. This video needed to spend less time watching Lorde listen to her own song and more on the story it created with the secondary male character.

This male character, getting possibly a third of the video‰’s screentime, has a narrative built on mostly blank stares and sparse environments. This is contrasted with a few interesting shots that make up the only complex images in the video. He is shown boxing with himself and then later laughing while blood pours from his face. These two shots alone are more interesting than the majority of the video, because they tell a story while being visually exciting. This male character goes to a variety of locations and has the most variation of camera angles and emotion in the entire piece. Though he spends the majority of it looking out windows or at the ceiling, his portions are padded by good use of rule of thirds and visually attractive locations.

The video‰’s strengths are in its set, placing most of it in the “cheap motel room‰” as described in the song. It‰’s here the male character faces himself and his boredom, but also the sparsity of his environment. If the video had bothered to expand on any of this, it could have been in interesting contrast with the poppy tune. Instead it delegated these shots to the background in favor of focusing on Lorde.

It‰’s a shame that this video wastes such nice production values and locations on shots that a tripod and middling film student could get in an hour. Most of the establishing environmental shots are beautiful; the footage seems to be graded at a nearly lavender color, bringing out the warmth in each scene. The final string of scenes with the male character are great because they use some non-traditional angles and motion that wasn‰’t used in the rest of the video. To think about the footage that is left on the cutting room floor is honestly heart breaking.

If this video wasn‰’t designed to sell the public Lorde as whatever sort of new pop star she may become, it would have a chance to tell a great story. As it is, it‰’s a vehicle to spend a few minutes watching a teenage girl bob along to her own voice.