Music Critic Cassandra Fong reviews Halsey and Amy Lee’s single, Hand That Feeds, from the soundtrack of the film Ballerina
Some songs are born in the back of a throat, choking on withheld screams. Others feel as if they were written in blood on the inside of a weapon’s casing. Hand That Feeds, Halsey and Amy Lee’s thunderous collaboration for the soundtrack of a John Wick spinoff (the upcoming Ballerina) is both.
Technically, the track is precise, cinematic—there is nothing accidental here. The percussive elements are tight and mechanical, like chamber clicks before a shot. Halsey’s opening verse unspools like the calm before violence: “I know I should have the pride / I know I should have the spirit.” It’s not confession—it’s strategy. The voice of someone assessing the ruins, calculating what’s left to burn.
If Halsey is the wound still bleeding, Amy is the scar that learned to speak. Amy Lee’s voice arrives in the second verse not as harmony, but as an escalation. Her vocals—rich, spectral, commanding—feel like a bloodstained aria echoing down the corridors of The Continental. She doesn’t plead. She pronounces. “I don’t wanna control the pain / Turn it into the fire I need.” In this world, pain isn’t a wound—it’s weaponised momentum.
“Technically, the track is precise, cinematic—there is nothing accidental here.
The pre-choruses serve as the song’s psychological hinge—both women asking questions that the Wick universe is too quiet to answer: “Do you think about me? Were you ever mine?” This question echoes the recurring theme of the film’s genre: relationships built on codes that are honoured more in the breach than in the promise. Whether it’s assassins, handlers, lovers, or ghosts, betrayal is always intimate.
But it’s the chorus where the song detonates: “You say I mean the world to you to keep me on my knees…” Their voices converge like a blade being drawn. You hear it not as a cry for help, but a declaration of intent. It’s music for a rooftop standoff, for the final walk into the lion’s den, when the cost has already been paid and only the reckoning remains.
There is such surgical cruelty in that line. It reveals the emotional blackmail at the heart of many power dynamics—whether in love, violence, or the shadows in between. And it turns, with terrifying grace, to the final accusation: “Turn around and bite the hand that feeds.”
Here, the title reveals its dual purpose. In the assassin’s world, biting the hand that feeds is not merely rebellion—it’s necessary evolution. It’s how you reclaim power when everything else has been taken. It’s the moment you stop surviving for others and start avenging yourself.
“[Amy Lee’s] vocals—rich, spectral, commanding—feel like a bloodstained aria echoing down the corridors of The Continental.
The bridge and outro deliver a searing conclusion. Amy sings, “Now watch me walk through the flames / Choking on the taste of your mistakes.” This is not a metaphor. It is cinematic literalism. Picture her walking through a burning room, eyes steady, past the man who underestimated her one last time. This isn’t vengeance in the mythic sense—it’s reclamation. Not justice, not balance—equilibrium.
In the conclusion—“Now you’re the one on your knees”—the tables don’t turn so much as collapse. The hand that once fed now trembles, empty. The hunter becomes the hunted, and the song closes like a silencer: no fanfare, just silence after reckoning.
What Halsey and Amy Lee have composed isn’t just a song—it’s a character study in crescendo. It stands beside other great soundtrack anthems not as set dressing but as narrative. You don’t need to see the spinoff to know the protagonist: a woman born in shadow, trained in silence, and baptised by betrayal. She doesn’t speak often, but when she does, it sounds like this. This isn’t redemption. It’s requital.
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