Charli XCX’s “The Moment” is a Horror Movie, Actually

Charli XCX’s 2024 album, Brat, was more than an album—it was a moment. “Brat summer,” as it will forever be known, combined hedonism and vulnerability. It captured the zeitgeist so strongly that it briefly revived a feeling of monoculture in an increasingly fragmented internet, to the point where even Kamala Harris jumped on the radioactive green bandwagon. Two years on, the singer’s latest cultural offering is The Moment—a film that dramatises the aftermath of Brat summer, where she is coming to terms with her icon status.

The Moment defies expectations. Far from the recent stream of hyper-earnest concert films and self-produced “tell-all” documentaries, the film is a hyper-awkward mockumentary imbued with the driest humor from British sit-coms. Written by Aidan Zamiri and Bertie Brandes, the script channels Jesse Armstrong (Succession, Peep Show); it makes you giggle in one scene, then beg for the ground to swallow you in the next.

In the cameo-packed movie, Charli plays a version of herself who is struggling to find a way to bring the “Brat era” to a close. Her antagonist? The album itself, which has catapulted her to a level of fame she’s not entirely comfortable with. Brat is now so big that it doesn’t really belong to her anymore—a situation that, as an artist, must be tantamount to a nightmare. The film is defined by a creeping sense of dread, to the point where, while there might not be masked villains or slasher scenes, The Moment feels like a horror movie.

Conceptually, The Moment is both prescient and provocative. We’ve become accustomed to watching celebrities tell their stories in pristine, PR-sculpted documentaries, where their famous friends talk about how amazing they are, and where the narrative is split into a satisfying three-part structure: The breakthrough, the fall, the comeback. And without wishing to fan the flames of their seemingly one-sided beef, Charli’s contribution to the canon feels like an indirect rebuke of Taylor Swift’s entire business model, where a conveyor-belt of warm, wholesome content—like the Eras Tour movie and Netflix’s Miss Americana documentary—underlines her icon status. When The Moment pokes fun at the clichés of pop concert tours, such as light-up wrist-bands and sentimental speeches, the parallels are obvious. (And I say that as someone who went to the Eras Tour and definitely shed a tear when confetti fell from the sky during “All Too Well.”)

Courtesy of A24

Charli XCX and Alexander Skarsgård as Johannes in The Moment.

The film version of Charli is a collaborator in the rampant commercialization of Brat. It perfectly captures the indignity of modern celebrity: We see her trapped in the #content hamster wheel, being hand-stitched into skin-tight clothes and spending hours in the glam chair all to record a two-minute video about what’s in her purse. It made me nostalgic for the era before social media, when artists had a sense of mystery and weren’t so beholden to creating “viral” moments or being featured on PopCrave.

An ominous countdown to the beginning of the Brat tour transmits a constant sense of impending doom that resembles the Final Destination franchise; Charli’s life continues at a hurtling pace as preparations fall further behind and things get more stressful. In this corporate horror story, Charli plays the role of the Final Girl—the last line of defense against her label and commercial partners, who threaten to destroy her vision. In this scenario, Johannes, the a film director tasked with making “the concert film,” excellently played by Alexander Skarsgård, is her main adversary. He gradually starts to take over the Brat tour and transforms it from an ecstasy-fuelled illegal rave, into a sanitized bubblegum pop concert full of sequins and glitter.

But just when we start to consider Charli as a victim—an artist who is having her brilliance stripped from her—she switches the narrative. After a run-in with a totally mesmerizing Kylie Jenner, she starts to change her tour out of crippling self-doubt. When she caves to commercial demands, we see that the real villain isn’t Johannes, the record label, or even Brat—her self-created Frankenstein monster—it’s a part of Charli herself, pulled in so many different directions that she can’t make a simple creative decision. She becomes a “yes” person, who doesn’t stay true to her own vision that made her an icon. She betrays her creative director Celeste (played by Hailey Benton Gates); the only person who actually listens to her, who seems more interested in making art than money. And in the end, Charli becomes the catalyst of her own cancellation.

Back in the “real” world, on the remix album version of “Everything is Romantic” featuring Caroline Polachek, Charli sings: “I feel smothered by logistics. Need my fingerprints on everything.” But in The Moment, her fingerprints begin to disappear from her own project.. It’s like she has created an on-screen avatar as a warning to herself about what she could very easily become. A Charli Wario.

It is characteristically smart to use a film as a way to finally draw a line under the Brat era. Like most things Charli XCX does, this movie feels ahead of its time, concealing deeper nuance behind its garish visuals and self-deprecating humor. I suspect we’ll look back on it and see that she eerily captured the moment.