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Olivia Rodrigo – brutal (Official Video)

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Olivia Rodrigo turns the arcade cabinet into a confession booth for teenage angst.

Olivia Rodrigo dropped the official video for “brutal” on August 23, 2021, giving the pop-punk opener of her chart-topping debut album SOUR a visual as chaotic and self-lacerating as the lyrics. It’s her second team-up with Canadian director and photographer Petra Collins, who also shot the video for “good 4 u.” Where that clip leaned into suburban revenge-fantasy, “brutal” goes full Y2K arcade nightmare, dropping Rodrigo into a rotating cast of characters who all seem to be losing it in slightly different ways.

• The video opens on a retro arcade-style “Choose your player” screen before Rodrigo cycles through personas including a collapsing ballerina, a glossy pop star, a news anchor, and a high schooler navigating packed hallways and cluttered bedrooms.
• Wardrobe styling from sisters Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo leans hard into early-2000s signifiers — butterfly clips, plaid sets, newsboy caps — with hair design by Clayton Hawkins.
• Rodrigo’s face is layered with animated AR filters and masks built by design studio Scholar for Apple’s #MadeoniPad campaign, drawn using Procreate.

A Second Round With Petra Collins

Collins had already defined the look of Rodrigo’s breakout era with “good 4 u,” so bringing her back for “brutal” wasn’t a small choice — it’s a statement that this is the visual language of SOUR as a whole. The two lean into a deliberately unstable aesthetic: hard cuts, character switches, and a color palette that swings from arcade neon to washed-out home-video grain. It plays like a companion piece rather than a standalone clip, extending the same nervous, overexposed energy that made “good 4 u” a hit.

Choosing A Player, Losing The Plot

The character-select intro is the video’s cleverest device. It frames adolescence itself as a game with no good options — ballerina, pop star, news anchor, student — each one a costume Rodrigo tries on and each one just as suffocating as the last. The ballerina collapses mid-performance; the news anchor delivers herself as a headline; the high schooler gets swallowed by hallway chaos. None of the “players” wins.

God, it’s brutal out here

That line, lifted straight from the song’s chorus, is effectively the video’s mission statement — every persona Rodrigo cycles through is another way of illustrating it. The lyric’s blunt self-diagnosis (“I’m not cool and I’m not smart / And I can’t even parallel park”) gets matched almost literally by the visuals, which refuse to let any single version of Rodrigo look like she’s got it figured out.

Styling As Storytelling

The Delgadillo sisters’ costume work does a lot of narrative heavy lifting without a word of dialogue. Butterfly clips, plaid, and newsboy caps root the video in a very specific early-2000s teen-magazine nostalgia, the same era Rodrigo has repeatedly cited as a reference point for SOUR’s whole rollout. Clayton Hawkins’ hair styling shifts alongside each persona, reinforcing the sense that identity here is something assembled and reassembled on command rather than fixed.

The AR Layer From Scholar And Apple

The video’s most technically distinct feature is its use of animated AR face filters, built by design studio Scholar as part of Apple’s #MadeoniPad campaign and rendered using Procreate. Overlaid on Rodrigo’s face throughout, the masks turn her expressions into something closer to an animated diary entry — a visual stand-in for the internal monologue the lyrics are already narrating out loud. It’s a rare case of a brand campaign tool actually shaping a music video’s core visual identity rather than just sitting in the corner as a logo.

“brutal” isn’t chasing a single iconic moment the way “good 4 u” chased its bathtub-and-flamethrower finale — it’s stacking small ones, one arcade-screen persona at a time. For a song that runs barely two and a half minutes, Rodrigo and Collins packed in enough costume changes, filter effects, and character bits that it plays more like a mood board than a narrative, which, for an opening track about not having your act together yet, is probably the point.