Harry Styles 'Aperture': An Elegy in F-Stops

Beneath the gleaming veneer of pop stardom, a shadow has been cast—a shadow not of one man, but of a story that grew into a monster. Harry Styles’ latest music video based on his new single, 'Aperture,' is a stark, unsettling departure, a piece that feels less like a music video and more like a forensic report from a psychological crime scene. While sanitized reviews flow in from media owned by his management may praise its artistic daring, a more honest, unflinching look reveals a profound and chilling thesis: this is a horror story about the creation, sustenance, and ultimate dissolution of a shared prison. It is a gothic tale not just of two speculated lovers, but of the very ecosystem that built their cage—an ecosystem comprising corporate strategy, fanatic devotion, and the selves that were lost in between. 'Aperture' finally opens a shutter not merely on a relationship, but on the damaged souls left in the wake of a modern story that burned for fifteen years.

From its first cold frames, 'Aperture' establishes a dissonance that is its central weapon. The lyrics are deceptively simple, echoing the hollowed-out platitudes of pop romance: “We belong together,” and the haunting, cyclical confession, “It finally appears, it’s only love.” Yet these words are vomited into a visual vacuum. We see no warmth, no passion, no joy except for the brief fake smile during a shared dance. Instead, we are presented with clinical sterility, claustrophobic proximity, and a palette drained of life. This is the chilling core of the video’s story: it exposes the lie by embodying its opposite. The promise of “love” is revealed as a trauma bond, a psychic tether forged in the white-hot, isolating pressure of fame and sustained by the relentless gaze of the world. “We belong together” transforms from a romantic vow into a desperate, shared mantra between two people who became mirrors of each other’s damage, their identities subsumed into a single, sprawling narrative.

To understand this video, you have to understand the people depicted in it. The media analyses we've seen are attempting to explain a story when they don't know the actors or the long-standing plot.

For instance, a review from CapitalFM on January 23 says: "In the 'Aperture' music video, Harry is seen in an empty hotel trying to get through to the reception desk. After failing to get through on the phone in his hotel room, he wanders down to the lobby where a man with a plastic bag, which says 'have a nice day', is watching him. Well, until Harry speaks out about what he intended the music video to portray we don't have a solid answer. However, it could be interpreted that the man chasing him is 'a good time', rather then him chasing a good time, it's chasing him. And after putting it off for so long he finally gives in, or in this case jumps into a Dirty Dancing lift."

Really? Do either of them look like they're having a good time? That's not even close. That was describing a banana as 'yellow' or the movie (500) Days of Summer (2009) as romance, when it is actually a deconstruction of romantic obsession and the danger of ignoring compatibility.

This narrative, of course (from the band One Direction), is “Larry Stylinson” as the only two people in the video clearly depict Harry and his former bandmate Louis Tomlinson (well understood in the fandom with the sunglasses, striped shirt and recently, a leather jacket). We know this because of the imagery of Louis's recent album promo. The man with the 'plastic bag' is a slight on Louis Lemonade. The name 'Lou' is even on the bag. Regardless of their former bandmate status however, Harry has chosen to present Louis in the story as a stalkerish creep.

To understand the depth of the haunting in 'Aperture,' one must acknowledge that “Larry” existed in some form long ago but evolved into a sprawling, self-sustaining entity—a digital-age gothic romance woven from glances, color codes, and lyrical breadcrumbs. But this romance (if it ever fully existed) had a dark twin: a collective trauma. The video’s setting is its master metaphor: a cold empty luxury hotel with stark corridors. This is the house that Larry built. Initially, a place well known to them as young naive bandmates, it was constructed brick by brick under the blinding, oppressive glare of the public eye.

Management teams, recognizing the explosive fuel of ardent speculation, played a deliberate, cruel game—stoking the flames with ‘coincidental’ staging, parallel interviews, matching imagery, and a lexicon of hints that kept the engine of belief roaring. They commodified the mystery, selling not just music, but the agonizing, beautiful possibility of a secret romance kept apart by an evil industry, a classic literary trope.

The hotel is, therefore, not a home. It is the gilded cage of the narrative itself. Its halls are the endless corridors of online forums; its locked rooms are the private moments made public; its lobby plays out the grandest dance for public viewing; its haunting dark atmosphere is the weight of millions of projections. The characters in 'Aperture' move through this space not as lovers, but as spectral inmates. They are prisoners of a story so powerful it attained its own reality, a narrative Frankenstein’s monster that turned on its creators.

The damage was bidirectional and profound. For the artists, it meant the brutal dissection of every friendship, every glance, every lyric under a microscope of insane expectation. It meant the denial of individual identity, as both were fused into a single unit in the public imagination. Their real, complex humanity—with its potential for simple friendship, for falling out, for ordinary life—was rendered irrelevant. They were characters in someone else’s epic.