Image provided courtesy of A24
Charli xcx’s brat began with its album rollout. In December 2024, the pop star told Variety that she was thinking about the marketing for the album long before she made the music. Her intention, according to the album's creative deck that she later publicly shared, was to use her fans, her “Angels,” to turn the project into a global fanfare. “The Angels are ready and waiting. This is the moment,” she wrote. Inadvertently, those lines likely also manifested her new A24 film, The Moment, out today, January 30.
“The moment” has turned into, well, many. brat came out in June 2024 and since then Charli’s gone on tour with Troye Sivan, released endless brand partnerships, and kickstarted endless, mind-numbing discourses about everything from the nature of her authenticity to her purported drug use, to her fraught relationships with her peer pop stars, and to the very idea of how long an album cycle deserves to last.
That last question is at the heart of the film, directed by music video director and longtime Charli collaborator Aidan Zamiri. In the film, her label, Atlantic (who also produced The Moment), is giddy about the (surprise) success of Charli’s new album. Bro-ey A&Rs make condescending references to her cult “scene” prior to the album, but remark, almost in awe, about just how huge the whole brat phenomenon has become. They want to keep it going until “next summer.” Charli, playing a heightened version of herself, also wants to keep the water boiling even as she wonders aloud to her social media manager (played by Isaac Cole Powell) if the whole “brat forever thing is cringe.”
“Everything is cringe,” he replies flatly.
It’s this ambivalence that haunts Charli, her team, and the label, throughout the rest of the film, ultimately leading to a horrific conclusion. If “everything” is cringe, then why should anyone try at all to remain cutting edge or honest? If everything is “cringe,” then nothing at all really matters.
The Moment is a horror movie. Yes — there is blood and paranoia and a spiral into the abyss. But more meaningfully, the film depicts the horrors of becoming a pawn of a corporate machine, and losing your sense of purpose along the way.
Throughout the film, Charli expresses a consistent feeling of overwhelm. Her team brings brand deals and obligations to her, and she’s so lost in the flurry of getting through her day, and navigating the now-growing hoard around her, that she says yes to essentially everything thrown her way.
If “everything” is cringe, then why should anyone try at all to remain cutting edge or honest?
That’s how she ends up getting paired with deeply condescending art-bro-guru Johannes (played by Alexander Skarsgård) as the director of her concert film. She also signs off on an ill-advised brat credit card. And she ends up becoming creatively estranged from those closest to her, like her creative director Celeste (played with confidence by Hailey Gates), who is committed to Charli’s unapologetic, NSFW initial vision of brat. Johannes, meanwhile, wants to make the tour more family friendly. “We all know that she’s signing about cocaine here, right?” Celeste asks, incredulously.
Photo provided courtesy of A24
Ironically, the film explores similar themes to her pre-brat album, Crash, for which she leaned into working with Atlantic and even sang songs written by professional songwriters. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of what a ‘sellout’ is in modern-day pop music and if it even exists,” she told Rolling Stone in 2022 about the album’s themes. In The Moment, Charli actually becomes a sellout, but shilling yourself isn’t positioned as subversive in the film. It’s sad.
It’s hard not to see the film’s final horrific turn toward corporatized pop stardom as also being, in some ways, about Charli’s (and perhaps every pop artist’s) music rival, Taylor Swift. When Charli relents to Johannes’s vision, she dons Life of a Showgirl glitter, she reaches her arm out to the crowd in very Swift fashion, she makes smiling speeches to the crowd. Her transformation into a Swift-like pop politician is as horrific as the final chapter of The Substance — not because Swift is so terrible, but because all of it is so untrue for Charli. And it’s sad for us to witness someone deflate themselves into cliché.
Thankfully, The Moment, as a film, avoids such a fate. It lingered with me like the final ghostly harps of “Track 10.” Amid all the discursive riff raff that Charli inspires it’s easy to forget her artistry, but The Moment shows us again that she really is this decade’s most essential and challenging pop star.
