'The Moment' Review: A Tonally Stunted Meta Take on the Concert Film
despite its lead star’s well-documented cinephilia, the film struggles to find a strong cinematic identity
In such a vast and decentralized media landscape, it takes a lot for something to become a phenomenon. If you’re reading this, there’s a very probable chance that you are aware of the sensation that was ‘Brat,’ the latest hyper-pop album from British star Charli XCX, which took the world by storm throughout 2024. Brat wasn’t just a successful album or a singular musical phenomenon; it overtook all aspects of pop culture and even seeped into political discourse for the better part of 2024, transcending the ‘Brat summer’ marketing and remaining popular to this day. Make no mistake, it’s not as if Charli XCX was some underground artist who made it big with one album, as she’d been a very successful artist for about a decade with many hits of her own, collaborations with other big artists, and had even dipped her toes into the film world by producing music for films like Barbie and Bottoms. In this moment in time, something like Brat, an techno-pop album with subject matter ranging from raves, cocaine, girlhood, and pop star rivalries, is truly a rare phenomenon, and one that is going to feel hard to explain to our grandkids in a few decades time due to how expansive and unprecedented it was. While Brat spanned many different demographics, Charli gained a following amongst the cinephile crowd, due to her many friendships and collaborations with various prominent actors and directors, her viral Letterboxd account, and movie-related TikTok videos, in which she truly reveals herself as a hardcore cinephile. Her expansion into the movie world came next, with small roles in films from acclaimed directors like Gregg Araki, Takashi Miike, Cathy Yan, and Romain Gavras, to name a few. Charli also began to lead films, such as TIFF 2025 premiere Erupcja, and the subject of this review, The Moment, a meta-comedy in which Charli plays a fictionalized version of herself, caught between various contrasting voices during the creation of a Brat concert film, directed by Aidan Zamiri, who previously worked with Charli on music videos for ‘Guess’ and ‘360’.
For most concert/album related films, whether documentaries or more narrative films like The Moment, vanity becomes a concern. The Moment tries to address this concern, depicting the complicated production of a Brat concert film, in which the director, Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård) wants to ‘sanitize’ Brat, noting that nothing about both the album and cultural entity is appropriate or accessible for a family audience, only to be reminded by Charli herself that there are several songs about cocaine, both literal and metaphorical. While undoubtedly an effective comedic moment, and one that grants its star talent a chance to remind the audience of her intent, the scene as a whole serves as a microcosm of The Moment, willing to dip its toes into ideological discourse about the cultural entity that is Brat, but never entering the water itself, opting for snarky retorts, which, in the parameters of the scene is admittedly justified, but becomes tiresome as the film progresses.
Ostensibly, the film's biggest battle is a tonal one. Perhaps this is disingenuous, but the vast majority of the film seems more interested in a self-serious aesthetic indebted to the style and tone of Succession, with a very light throughline of both extraneous and corporate powers misinterpreting the vibe of Brat and Charli’s persona at large. The film’s mockumentary nature doesn’t mesh well with the aforementioned style that the film tries translate into, for the most part. There are a few good comedic moments that slip through, but the larger commentary that the film alludes to feels as if it’s hampered by trying to emphasize its own stakes with the serious visual style. The unrelenting narrative rhythm seldom allows for some much-needed quiet, introspective moments that bolster the emotional resonance of the film. Cameos of real-life celebrities end up feeling gratuitous, with little thematic or comedic value. By the time the film really leans into outlandish territory with more tangible stakes and comedy, in the form of a subplot about Brat-branded credit cards going belly-up, it feels too late. It’s a shame, as the film feels better suited for a less reverent, zanier approach that emphasizes the craziness of the phenomenon while directly forcing the fictional Charli to reckon with what Brat means to her fans and corporate entities alike.
Conversely, credit must be given to the creative team for not just simply trying to adhere to the established Brat aesthetics. As shown in the film’s narrative, many would have preferred a more conventional project that rehashed the neon green and played the album’s greatest hits, and while it’s been argued that the attempts at commentary and mediation ring hollow, there were at least attempts; when it could have been a much safer and less stylized version of itself. Charli herself proves a competent actress, and there are moments in the film in which the distillation of her fame does work in some capacity. While tonally stunted, I imagine that fans of Charli XCX will have a good time nonetheless, and get more than I did out of this strange, meta, half-cooked eulogy to the Brat phenomenon.