The New Halo Top Commercial Is a Dystopian Nightmare

Soylent Green is people. This we know. But as to how ridiculously popular ice cream brand Halo Top manages to keep the calorie count in its "healthy" pints a staggering 75 percent lower than that of a typical pint of Ben & Jerry's or Häagen-Dazs—well, that's still kind of perplexing. It has something to do with whipping a bunch of air into it, swapping out sugar for calorie-free stevia, and adding a bunch of "prebiotic fiber," whatever that looks like in raw form, but it still sounds like sorcery.

Even knowing all of that, there is still a lot of mystery as to what in bloody hell is going on in Halo Top's new commercial, which looks a lot more like a particularly dystopian episode of Black Mirror than an advertisement for a frozen confection primarily consumed by women who worship their Class Passes and only order vodka-sodas.

It involves a really old woman being force-fed by a robot and then maybe realizing that she's about to die alone in a room where human life is only necessary as a conduit for ice-cream-eating, or something? And there's a part where she asks for a man named David—presumably her husband—before being told, "Everyone you love is gone." Super uplifting stuff. Enjoy!

The commercial was conceived by director Mike Dahlquist, a.k.a. "Mike Diva," who was given "free reign" to conceptualize a spot for the company, according to Halo Top Founder and CEO Justin Woolverton. Looks like he ran with it.

"It's almost like an anti-ad," Woolverton told Ad Age. "If anything it portrays ice cream a little negatively but we thought that was overshadowed by how great the dark comedy was."

Diva has done some pretty outside-the-box stuff in the past, including a bizarro remix of the "show me the money" line from Jerry Maguire, a music video for a song called "I'm on Crack" from Mindless Self Indulgence side project The Left Rights, and another robot-themed video for rap-rock party band 3OH!3.

This all makes Halo Top's previous commercials that portrayed bargaining with the devil look positively tame in terms of emotional impact. However, the ad still might not match the jarring creepiness of Philadelphia-based Little Baby's Ice Cream's "This Is a Special Time" commercial from 2012, which continues to traumatize all who see it.

Whatever happened to those chill-ass, ASMR-friendly Breyer's commercials about how natural and simple the ingredients in their ice cream were? Guess they're gone with the pre-2017 wind. After all, as the robot said, everyone you love is gone.