As the video starts, a man dressed completely in black is shown playing the guitar. Behind him is a child's room, which starts to illuminate as the man starts singing and a child sits up on the bed. The girl gets up, moving closer to the singer, Adam Gontier, to join hands with her parents as each enters from the darkness beyond the walls of her room. The mother touches the girl's face lovingly as the father smiles and the parents and girl begin to dance around in a circle.
As the singer says 'never too late', the scene changes to a young woman being forcefully hauled through a sterile, hospital-like environment by two nurses. The singer momentarily reappears with the slightly sinister shadows of the young girl and her parents swirling visible on the wall behind him. The young woman turns back over her shoulder to look at another woman, the mother of the girl in the previous scene who is apparently grown and in an asylum, the same woman being hauled down the hallway. The older woman (the mother) is crying as she turns away from the daughter, who is pulled back along the hallway by the nurses. Darker scenes of the girl and her parents are shown behind members of the band and the singer as the music continues, before showing the daughter seemingly give in to the nurses and watch her mother go.
The scene again changes and the girl is back, with her mother and father slowly releasing her outstretched hands. The father reappears, sitting beside the girl and placing his hand against the front of her shoulder.
Anguished shots of the grown daughter's face are shown as she lies with her hair strewn around her, flashing back and forth between her grown self and herself as a child running to her bed and hiding underneath it. The flashback changes as the nurses begin to strap the daughter's wrists and feet to her bed, showing her mother and father with band-aids over their eyes as they dance with her in a circle. The shadow of her father is shown approaching her bed as her grown self struggles against her restraints, which have turned into her father's hands. Her memory then flashes back to her younger self still hiding under the bed, which is flipped over by her father to reveal her curled into a fetal position on the floor.
The scene changes again to show her younger self sitting with her father's hand still on her shoulder. She glances up at him before calmly leaving his frozen figure still seated as she approaches a number of mysteriously falling black feathers.
A monarch butterfly comes to sit on the bandages and pills next to the grown daughter as she lies strapped to her bed, and the flashback continues, showing the cause of the feathers to be a young man floating in the corner of her room, dresses completely in black and flapping two large, black wings that shed as they're flapped.
The butterfly leaves the medical table next to the now reasonably calm, grown daughter as she peers anxiously around herself, a flashback showing her sitting on her bed as a child, surrounded by black handprints all over herself, her furniture and her bed - the camera zooms out to show the paint-blackened hands of the father.
As the younger girl lies on her bed, her father and the black angel begin to fight, feathers falling as they push each other around the small room. As the feathers fall, they begin to collect around the younger girl, and also on the asylum bed around the girl, full grown. The fight between the angel and the father continues as the falling feathers increase in number and the grown girl begins to smile as her fathers hands/her restraints release her wrists and ankles. The grown girl curls into the fetal position on her hospital bed as the flashback of her father and angel fighting stops, with the father retreating. The grown girl climbs off her bed and begins to walk towards the camera, giving the impression of walking up her wall as a flashback of her younger self runs to her bed and climbs into it, her grown self smiling as she stops in front of the camera.
While I've seen this music video by Three Days Grace multiple times, I'd never really stopped to think about the storyline or the significance of said storyline in connection with the song, which is slightly ironic, considering it's one of the main things I love about this video - there's a complete storyline to go along with it.
I think the main reason that this video is so appealing to me - aside from the music - is because I was raised around a never-ending supply of horror and/or mystery movies, which allowed me a daily dose of craziness that has come to influence my own interests in movies, books, art, etc. The mystery surrounding why the young girl has come to be placed in an asylum, combined with the surreal (what I assume are) flashbacks that include fights with floating angels and band-aid-eyed parents (vaguely reminiscent of Coraline's 'Other Parents') serves to draw me in and hold my attention as I try to catch every flash of memories and scene changes between the daughter's past and present.
I also learned that every member of 'Three Days Grace' is from Toronto, Canada - where I'm from. How cool is that?
