Synopsis

A young girl wanders through the vast, decaying corridors of Holloway Sanatorium, moving between empty rooms and shadowy staircases as if caught between different times. The Cure perform nearby with an unusual detachment, observing her rather than interacting with her. The girl's presence and the building's institutional atmosphere create a dreamlike, unsettling interpretation of "Charlotte Sometimes," reflecting the song's themes of disorientation, identity, memory, and shifting realities.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was filmed at Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey, a large former psychiatric hospital that had closed in 1980. The site is now known as Virginia Park.

• The song and video draw directly from Penelope Farmer's 1969 children's novel *Charlotte Sometimes*, which concerns a schoolgirl who moves between two different time periods. Robert Smith later described the song as a "straight lift" from the book.

• The video was shot in late September 1981, shortly before the single's release in October of that year.

• The film was preserved in *Staring at the Sea - The Images*, The Cure's 1986 home-video collection. The collection helped give the otherwise non-album single a wider visual legacy.

• Robert Smith later criticized the video heavily, calling it The Cure's worst and saying that it damaged his impression of what had been his favorite song at the time. He felt that the video left viewers with an inescapable image of a blonde girl walking through a mansion rather than the mystery he had imagined.