Aston Martin releases surreal SUV spot

Tribal dress, modern dance, neon hula hoops, giants emerging from the earth – none of this has a huge amount to do with family-sized cars, but, hey, in the crazy world of creative car ads anything goes right?

With a suitably gnomic tagline Beautiful is Relentless, the film is a collaboration between Zhou and Prism and was produced by Great Guns. It combines slickly edited shots of the DBX racing around a circuit, with contemporary dancing, people sprinting across hazy fields and slinking through hula hoops – the whole being brought together with a sumptuous colour palette of scarlett and teal that was in the client's original briefing deck. 

Zhou was given the freedom to use her own creativity to come up with unique visuals and sound design, having been given a brief – but no script – that suggested the overall feeling of what the client wanted for the various assets. 

The director accessed childhood emotions to come up with the concept, commenting: “When I was first presented with the brief, I thought of a personal approach, of feeling free and then restrained. The piece is also about living in a relentless, existential, nocturnal place. DBX describes a feeling of defiance, like an animal in a cage it is pacing and growling, about to jump out and leap free.”

An abandoned, overgrown, 1920s-built race track, Autódromo de Sitges-Terramar, near Barcelona, provided one of the film's atmospheric locations.