Ladies and gentlemen, do you believe that a puppet can change your life? No? Please, lend me your ear as I tell you of my conversion to the International Church of the Interpol Puppet.

I was once like you, my friends—a young, bold intellectual, full of sarcasm, prone to bitter self-doubt and frequent crises. Then I saw the video for “Evil,” and realized that the puppet protagonist embodied all these intimate emotions.

I’ll let you make your own conclusions about the ambiguous plot—it follows an eerily Sesame Street-esque puppet, who may have killed a woman in a car crash, as he is tended to by doctors and either dies or miraculously survives, depending on your interpretation.

But I’ll tell you this much—watch the puppet’s facial expressions with every bit of attention you’ve got. They capture that cocktail of crushing and transcendent feelings you get when you’re horribly stress-exhausted or intoxicated and you realize that you’ve done some horrible things in your life.

You shake violently, you laugh even more violently, you weep, you beg for your mom, there are hands all around you, you sing at the top of your lungs to exorcise the demons while you get tucked into bed, and somehow, your life makes more sense than ever. Add that to a song that’s already about passionate loneliness, and you’ve got your video salvation for midterm studying.

—Abe J. Riesman