Five years after making “Love in a Hopeless Place,” Calvin Harris has forced Rihanna into yet another hopeless place, this time in the video for their team-up track “This Is What You Came For.” The premise is simple enough: Our heroine is trapped in a multicolored, strobe-lit cube in the middle of a forest, possibly some sort of futuristic maximum-security prison for people caught raving out too hard, while Calvin or some other nondescript white man occasionally appears menacingly in the background.
Look, the video is fine. It’s fine! Rihanna looks stunning, as always — she’s certainly the only person who can wear a glitter snuggy to a rave — and the visuals are engaging, even if Drake already gave us the definitive dancing-in-a-neon-cube video. But while Rihanna twirling and making sexy eyes is arguably a force potent enough to end most global conflicts, Calvin’s embroiled in one media firestorm that even she can’t distract us from.
