'The Moment' Is the Death and Immortalization of brat
By Natalie McCarty
“Do you really want brats to run this country? They already do enough damage.”
Courtesy of A24
There’s something perversely fitting about seeing The Moment at a completely sold-out matinee screening deep in Freak City, USA, surrounded by what felt like all of Hollywood’s most annoying people. It situates the film exactly where it belongs, inside the machinery of culture, spectacle, and power. And brats who don’t have work at 2:30pm!
Courtesy of A24
From its opening moments, The Moment is unmistakably Charli XCX. The film moves the way her music feels–disorienting, fast, overstimulating, emotionally exposed. It’s nonlinear and jagged, an orchestrated wreck by design. Watching it feels less like observing a narrative and more like being trapped inside a consciousness: 365 bumpin’ that, ricocheting between self-awareness and self-erasure. So much is happening, and yet so little is resolved. That tension is obviously intentional, as the film hinges on its restlessness and refuses stillness the way fame refuses privacy.
Beyond the pop stardom she fought so fiercely to achieve, Charli uses The Moment to interrogate influence itself, who gets it, who deserves it, and what it costs to maintain it. The film is meta in the rare, appropriate sense of the word. Not smug or self-satisfied, but deeply self-aware and singular.
Courtesy of A24
Part of what gives The Moment its bite is how immediate it feels. Producer David Hinojosa has described the film as intentionally existing just barely in the rearview mirror, designed to unfold as if it’s happening in near real time. That urgency is palpable. The film doesn’t feel reflective so much as reactive, like it was made before the dust had time to settle. There’s a magic trick at play in the parallel universe Charli and director Aidan Zamiri construct, one where meaning hasn’t yet solidified and the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Miss the moment, the film seems to warn, and it’s gone for good.
Courtesy of A24
While much of the audience waited eagerly for Kylie Jenner’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it debut, which lasts about two seconds and is just fine, I was far more invested in my Norwegian love, Alexander Skarsgård. He is delightfully off-putting here, fully committing to his role as the king of freaks. Skarsgård has always excelled at playing charming, seductive menace (hello True Blood), and here he embodies the exact kind of power broker that populates Charli’s orbit. Men who speak in opportunity and implication, whose offers always come with invisible fine print.
Courtesy of A24
You get the unmistakable sense that many of the film’s propositions, negotiations, and moral qualms are drawn from real experiences Charli herself has likely faced. But The Moment refuses the easy narrative of victimhood, and instead insists on something sharper and more uncomfortable. Charli is only Charli XCX–and she is only as big as she is–because she is fiercely, distinctly, stubbornly herself.
That insistence becomes the film’s central stake. This isn’t a story about fame versus anonymity; it’s about authenticity against the stakes. The real fear isn’t selling out, it’s disappearing into a version of yourself that the industry loves more than the real one. Fame doesn’t just distort how others see Charli; it distorts how she sees herself.
The question lingering beneath every scene (before she even says it herself) is simply: If enough people liked her, if enough people paid attention, would she finally look in the mirror and like herself?
Courtesy of A24
Formally, the film mirrors this psychological instability. The pacing is intentionally unsteady, and the editing refuses to let you settle. Scenes begin mid-thought and end without resolution, mirroring how fame interrupts the interior life. It is chaotic from the jump, but the final act is a full descent into madness. It’s disorienting, exhausting, and gripping in equal measure. I’d also be remiss here not to mention the needle drop of “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” which completely seals the deal and is undoubtedly the best use of that song ever.
In that way, the film feels like a perfect kiss goodbye to brat summer, the death of brat, perhaps, but also its immortalization.
What the film captures so sharply is not just the exhaustion of success, but the violence of cultural saturation. Zamiri has described it as being written at the tail end of brat summer, watching something once underground and unruly being stripped for parts in real time. The Moment keeps asking the same question in different forms: what happens when something cool is sterilized, repackaged, and sold back to the masses? And more crucially, what happens to the artist caught in that churn, suspended between persona and person, product and self?
Courtesy of A24
The brat summer era is buried here, but it’s also embalmed, preserved, and ushered into something new. While it may be over, it will never fully leave. The Moment makes sure of it.
