| Director(s) | Aidan Zamiri |
| Principal Cast | Charli XCX as herself Hailey Benton Gates as Celeste Alexander Skarsgård as Johannes |
| Release Date | 2026 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 103 minutes |
| Report Card | Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary |
Note: This review was done off of theatrical viewings of the film and as such the review does not feature images or extended granular analysis. Once I am able to get a physical copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from, the review will be updated to match the site’s standard review format.
We open in a period of transition, cross-cutting between a Charli XCX music video, her iconic strobing lights, and news footage christening her Brat era, the biggest album event in her career — this is the moment.
The instability of the montage, its chimeric composition of creative expression and its mainstream evaluation, points to the heart of the films focus — the machinations that arise when an artistic moment has been identified by a zeitgeist that may not be in tune with its nuances and the desires that ultimately determine the extent of what that influence can be translated to.
Charli’s album, Brat, an electric hyper-pop album (amongst many things) is seized upon by corporate executives and yes-men who know nothing of the music and everything about the catch phrases (brat summer) eagerly looking to take hold of the moment by translating the album into a concert film, directed by a specialist of the genre, Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård).
There hope is to use Johannes’ prestige and accolades as a stepping-stone by which to make the moment last forever — brat summer will never end (alongside the money associated with it).
Yet, Johannes’ intervention during a concert preparation session between Charli and her artistic director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates) reveals a darker implication: commercial acceptance is death, translation is eradication. He is less interested in directing a film than completely resignifying what “Brat” is.
In order for Brat, an album about “coke”, as Celeste bluntly describes, to do well with family units comprised of parents and their children, an audience whom the artist and album were never intended for, the vulgarities and provocations at the heart of the aesthetic and appeal of the project have to be made moderate, conservative. Suddenly, references to coke aren’t literal but “metaphorical” as though bumping a metaphorical line would make sense. But sense doesn’t matter when what is being sold is not the thing but an idea of the thing.
Therein lies the gambit: Johannes’ sabotaging of the concert is a meta-textual referendum regarding the film. If the concert itself is an fictive approximation of the album meant to aid in the construction of the film, then a mockumentary about that concert experience would be a layer of artifice even further removed from that. Fans wanting to buy into Brat via this purported best manner of experience would never engage with the material itself. Like a game of telephone, the original message becomes so distilled by the end of the process that it might as well be something wholly other.
Director Aidan Zamiri captures this collapse in formal coherence, constantly shifting modes between a Severance style drama and mockumentary until the lines between the delineations explode in a finale which serves as a telling rejoinder-cum-capitulation to the opening montage. Both the album and its gestalt break through the film in echoes: striking neon location cards which strobe quickly, lingering just long enough to register but refusing to be perceived a moment longer.
Though the process is uneven and there are certainly plot beats that feel like they’re out of lock-step with the process of the film’s deconstructive rhythm, these digressions ultimately become folded into the messy movement of the film accentuating the experience — we’re stuck in a torrent of updates and distractions, placing us squarely in Charli’s camp as she’s made to navigate the byzantine mainstream and determine what her art means, both to herself as an artist and to the audience that consumes it and its derivatives.
This explains the lack of any song breaks or needle-drops from the album that the film is purportedly about. This isn’t a celebration but a funeral. Brat is dead and is haunting The Moment. A.G. Cook’s score reinforces this feeling — opting for hypnotic synths which let parts of Brat to leak through, an excess that both The Moment and the film within are circling, desperate to ensnare in a new commercial packaging.
That Aidan and Charli created a film about Brat that tip toes around the album like the proverbial elephant in the room whilst simultaneously littering the film with increasingly banal references to it is both hilariously frustrating to fans of the album looking for an analogous experience but also incredibly brat.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | The Moment‘s exploration of artistry and the price of mainstream success is as messy as it is intriguing but builds to a a crescendo worthy of applause as the film’s formal breakdowns of the artifice of concert-film collides with the trappings of a mockumentary. |
| Rating | 8.8/10 |
| Grade | A |
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .