At its core, The Moment is a film about how hard it is to make something raw, authentic and personal in a world where labels, brand partners and capital are always ready to turn art into strategy. It’s a story about an artist fighting to keep ownership of her own creation, even as it grows so huge that it can barely be controlled anymore. In the film, BRAT becomes not just a success, but a monster of meaning, hype and money — and Charli XCX stands right in the middle of it all, still trying to recognise herself.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
There is something almost physically stressful about The Moment. Not because the film is dramatic in the classic sense, but because it refuses to give the audience any sense of overview.
People move in and out of the frame at a pace that feels deliberately disorienting. Label reps. Stylists. Directors. Brand partners. Contracts are discussed on staircases. Creative decisions are made in corridors.
No one explains who anyone is.
You quickly understand why.
The film is not trying to explain the BRAT era. It is trying to recreate what it must have felt like to be inside it. That is a smart choice. BRAT was never a story that could be properly explained in a meeting room.
Charli XCX moves through it all with a strange, almost hypnotic calm. She is cool, sharp, a little cross-eyed from overstimulation, and yet always herself. Or rather: a version of herself that is constantly being reflected back at her by other people, all of whom think they know what she should be.
That may be the film’s most interesting move: Charli paradoxically takes up so little space. The camera is almost as interested in the people around her. The people who make a living putting other people’s talent into words. The people who say “authenticity” as if it were something you could drop into a deck.
The Moment is genuinely funny, and it matters to say that out loud, because cultural criticism becomes boring very quickly when it falls in love with its own seriousness. This film does not make that mistake. It is dry, sharp and, in several places, outright ridiculous in exactly the right way.
Director Johannes, played by Alexander Skarsgård with precisely the mix of cool detachment and latent idiocy the role requires, delivers one of the film’s best lines when he asks:
“Is she singing about cocaine or metaphorical cocaine?”
It is so stupid that it becomes precise. Because the question actually sums up the music industry’s relationship to art: it wants edge, as long as it can categorise it. It wants wildness, as long as it can explain it afterwards.
A stylist later gets to say what everyone else is thinking, but only she dares to put it bluntly:
“This one is sluttier, so I think it’s better.”
It is a fantastic line. Not just because it is funny, but because it contains the whole BRAT aesthetic. Brazen, self-aware, a little idiotic and at the same time completely aware of what it is doing. BRAT became such a mood, a colour, an attitude and an economic opportunity for so many people that the film almost feels like a necessary revenge on all of it.
Kylie Jenner appears as a kind of absurd fever-dream mentor figure. Charli meets her at one of her lowest points, and Kylie delivers a perfectly plastic, smooth-edged cynicism that amounts to a modern piece of industry advice: if people are getting tired of you, don’t pull back. Push harder.
The scene is funny, but also disgustingly recognisable. It exposes something deeply ugly in the logic of success today: you must never disappear. You must never go quiet. You must never stop being relevant, performative, marketable.
Again and again, the film returns to the idea that BRAT must continue. That it has to last until next summer. That the wave must be kept going. As if an artistic aesthetic were a pool party someone has budgeted for.
That is perhaps where The Moment becomes more than satire. It becomes a film about fear. Not the fear of flopping, but the fear of getting trapped inside your own breakthrough. What do you do when you have created something so distinct, so powerful and so culturally dominant that everyone expects you either to repeat it or monetise it to the bitter end?
It is a question the film does not answer politely. Thankfully.
Instead, it shows what it feels like to be creative in a room where everyone else also has interests. There is a studio scene where Charli has to be artistic in real time while being watched by the human inventory list of the industry. Cameras. Assistants. A director. People sitting there looking on as if genius were something you should be able to switch on and off between two Zoom meetings.
It is uncomfortable. And very successful.
The whole film feels like one giant fuck you. Not an angry one. More a tired, elegant and extremely well-manicured fuck you to all the people who love art as long as it can be packaged, pitched and sold on.
And maybe that is why it hits so hard.
Because beneath all the satire and exaggeration, there is something sad here too. Something lonely. A young woman who has clearly fought for a long time to be allowed to make something that feels like her own, and who, the moment it succeeds, is immediately surrounded by people who want a percentage of the experience.
The film does not directly ask what Charli XCX has been through in her life or career. But it makes you think it. What has she had to endure? How many versions of herself has she had to reject? How many men in blazers have told her what the next move should be?
The Moment is not subtle. Thank God. It is hectic, dry, funny and, in places, so precise in its portrait of industry people that you almost want to send flowers to everyone who has ever survived a creative status meeting.
And then, quite frankly, it is just hugely entertaining. You want to stay in it. Not because it looks pleasant, but because it looks true.
When the film ends with the words:
“Everyone can keep the brat summer going on forever - but for me it’s over,”
it does not feel like a full stop. More like an exhausted statement of fact. An artist watching her own cultural afterlife being planned by others, and in the same motion trying to step out of it.
It is a strong ending. Not grand. Just exact.
The Moment is not just a film about Charli XCX. It is a film about what happens to art when everyone suddenly can see its value. And about how hard it is to keep recognising your own reflection when so many other people keep holding it up in front of you.
