Nearly two years after the release of electropop album “BRAT,” which took the world by storm, Charli xcx, A24 and director Aidan Zamiri have released a mockumentary film showing Charli dealing with the unexpected fame.
While I was not a huge listener of the British singer-songwriter’s music in 2024 when her popular album came out, I have added a couple of her songs to my playlists over the years, and I am a big fan of the nightclub aesthetic she has gone for recently. And, after learning that Zamiri, the director of her Grammy-nominated “360” music video, would be writing and directing this film, I could not wait to catch it in theaters.
With Charli playing herself in the starring role, “The Moment” centers around the singer preparing for her arena tour while Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), a renowned director, attempts to twist the performance into his own vision for a concert film Charli’s label signed on for.
The film’s opening credits immediately caught my attention with flashing strobe lights and aggressive bass sounds, and I figured that this level of intensity would be persistent throughout the film. Surprisingly, though, the rest of the mockumentary ends up much tamer than the beginning.
The trailers for the "The Moment” cleverly incorporated the thrill of the album’s music, but very few of Charli’s songs were actually included in the film. For an album that was so unique and packed with depth, I was disappointed that Zamiri did not utilize more of the tracks throughout the film, especially since the record is such a key element of the plot.
The humor in this film caters to Gen-Z audiences, largely because they’re the main listeners of Charli’s album. But this type of humor is extremely difficult to pull off. Relying on dryness, sarcasm and a fine line between harmless and offensive, the film’s jokes require impeccable delivery to make the audience laugh, which Charli simply doesn’t have.
This stuck out to me strongly during the Vogue photoshoot scene, where the focus was meant to be placed on Charli’s stylist making poor decisions with her look, but I was too distracted by her rude tone directed towards all her staff.
As revealed in previous interviews, Charli wants to shift gears toward acting. Unfortunately, her range is very limited, and her line delivery often comes across much flatter than it should. This ultimately makes many of the jokes in the film feel too harsh, and I found myself frequently annoyed with Charli’s character when it’s clear that is not the writer’s intention.
While “The Moment” director and writer Zamiri has directed several of Charli’s music videos, he has no screenwriting experience. This is evident very early on, as none of the characters’ dialogue holds any weight; the conversations instead feel transactional rather than personal.
There are some standout performances, though, which unsurprisingly come from experienced actors Skarsgård and Rosanna Arquette, who plays a record label executive. Almost all my laughs from this movie came from their lines, which I give sole credit to the delivery rather than the jokes themselves.
What disappointed me the most about this film was not the overall performances or the humor, but the plot of the movie, which so rarely touched upon the overwhelming success of “BRAT.” Interestingly, the few times the album is explicitly mentioned are when Charli or another character is worried about the longevity of the hype surrounding it.
Stylistically, this film is strangely afraid to commit to the mockumentary style behind the camera. There are very few points throughout the film that the characters ever address the cameras or make direct eye contact with them, so it rarely feels like the film is meant to evoke the feeling of a documentary at all.
This made a lot of the shots especially frustrating to me, as the camera would be inconsistently placed either behind doors and windows or standing with the actors during their conversations.
It makes me wonder if this album and concept as a whole were too much for Zamiri, who's never taken on a feature-length project. While it’s understandable that Charli would want the person behind the success of her recent music videos to develop her film, Zamiri shows through his mediocre writing and drab directing that his talent lies in short-form content.
