Pick You Up at 6: Be Here (2025) – 5 stars

Director: Zoë Love Smith

Cast: Kees Koenders, Ródae Valentijn, Rómeycia Valentijn, Alena, Duella Valentijn

Running time: 4mins

In the three years since we extended our reviews to music videos, less than half have received positive marks. The average rating is just over 2 stars – and no film has ever received a perfect score.

On top of explaining what’s great about Zoë Love Smith’s Pick You Up at 6: Be Here, I will also be considering what might have helped it buck the trend in this article. Because as you will have noticed at the top of the page, this is a five-star review.

Built around two of Zoë Love Smith’s own tracks – the lo-fi ballad be here and Loneliest Man (produced in collaboration with May) – the film builds them into a lyrical soundtrack for a visual meditation on cycles of self-destruction, family and forgiveness. Often when we have received music videos, there has been a disconnect with what we see and hear, either stemming from misunderstandings or a lack of communication – so perhaps with the musician orchestrating the tracks into a movie-narrative of her own made it easier to bridge that divide. But that being said, Danny Pryp also directs his own music videos – so it’s clearly not the only factor at play.

Pick You Up at 6: Be Here’s story follows Don (Kees Koenders) – a father who is letting past traumas get the best of him. On days driving with his young daughter Zöe (Ródae Valentijn and Rómeycia Valentijn), he blindly assumes she will not understand the gravity of his actions – from handing over a handful of jewlery to a drug dealer, to canoodling with his pregnant mistress. His wreckless and uncaring behaviour leads to the fracturing of their family – so far, so straightforward.

But in a tonal shift, built around a change between tracks to the lower, slower Loneliest Man, Love Smith decides to peel back the layers, and examine what psychological traumas might cause men to behave this way. Granting us a glimpse into Don’s own childhood, we see a boy seated at an empty table, desperate to connect with an absent mother. The empty flat around him becomes a cavernous void, as he longs to be seen and connected to a maternal presence.

Placed in montage alongside footage from the present day, we see Don and his daughter standing in a deserted space, staring at each other. Unsure of how to approach at first, the pair are reconciled – and in that moment they change places – with Duella Valentijn now taking on the role of an older Zöe as a maternal figure, embracing Jah-Vinihio Hooi, who played the young version of Don in the flashbacks.

In the years where Don let himself and his daughter down, he might have been ignoring his feelings of rejection from his real mother, and chasing the approval and attention of as many women as possible, as a means to prove he is in some way deserving. But only by finding the space to put that to rest and change as a person does he become someone who can receive the genuine connect, and unconditional affection that he has so long craved.

Love Smith hasn’t just approached the concept of a music video as a promotional tool, then. This is not a quick and direct advertisement for her music. She has instead used it to construct a piece of multimedia art, complementing and building on the themes of her music to deliver on emotionally potent, and possibly psychoanalytic subtexts.

Again, it is hard to pinpoint what the X factor was here. The budget of €5,000 seems like a lot of money – but I have seen much worse delivered for much more. The extensive technical team made every detail shine, but there are plenty of films where that is the case, and which still end up as less than the sum of their parts.

What it might really boil down to is authenticity. When people use art to work through the peaks and troughs of their own lived experience, it can be the most powerful driving creative driving force there is. So without wanting to jump to conclusions (the writer-director-musician has the same name as the film’s daughter, but that doesn’t guarantee anything), that could have yielded something truly special here – and which will hopefully touch countless other viewers and listeners in the near future. The challenge with that kind of creation is the willingness to engage with a part of yourself that may still be raw with pain – and above all the technical prowess on display here, the filmmaker deserves plaudits for her courage to have done that.