In a 2025 Vanity Fair profile of Charli XCX, Anna Peele described the singer as “[fascinated by] how information is decontextualized.” The Moment, Aidan Zamiri’s 2026 film starring Charli XCX, chronicles the evolution of the phenomena surrounding Brat, the singer’s sixth and most commercially successful album, and how its creator fought to maintain its original meaning.
Charli XCX describes The Moment as a “meta-mocumentary”. Its events are fictional, but filmed in a documentary style to parody modern pop stars’ ability to control every aspect of their image. The documentary style also allows Charli XCX to portray how, when Brat succeeded, various stakeholders descended upon her like vultures, intent on milking the album for every dollar they could extract. “Everyone wants me to make a green Kit Kat,” the singer lamented in The Moment, referring to the green hue of the record’s cover.
In the film, Alexander Skarsgard plays Johannes Godwin, the vainglorious director of Brat’s would-be concert film. In reality, there is no Brat Tour film. Charli XCX told Vanity Fair, “The seed of [The Moment] was conceived from this idea of being pressured to make [a tour documentary].” At the conclusion of The Moment, the fictional version of Charli XCX succumbs to her record label’s vision and helps Godwin transform the Brat Tour into a green version of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
During production of the fictionalized Brat Tour, Godwin says, “A nightclub is not a story. The night has to end.” This is the very idea that Brat fights against. In the world of Charli XCX, a nightclub is a story. By setting up Godwin’s line as a counterargument, The Moment makes the best case for Brat’s existence by creating a believable caricature of someone intent on destroying its meaning.
Later in the film, at a wellness spa in Ibiza, Charli encounters Kylie Jenner, a reality-TV star and beauty mogul, who is playing herself. On her family’s reality show, Jenner’s personality is media-trained out of existence. However, that erasure makes Jenner the perfect candidate to embody the cynical forces that Charli XCX fought against to maintain the integrity of her art. Because a parody of flatness inevitably requires realness, Jenner’s portrayal of herself inThe Moment is startlingly convincing.
Despite the aloofness of her public persona, Charli XCX strives for realness. Although Taylor Swift is a target of The Moment’s satire, in a 2009 Rolling Stone interview, the singer-songwriter described the struggle to maintain “self-preservation” amidst media scrutiny, a sentiment that aligns with the premise of The Moment. The film seeks to preserve the ineffable coolness of Brat by admitting that it is Charli’s final vessel for doing so.
Pop culture moves quickly, and, while experiencing her greatest success to date, Charli XCX reconciled with the passage of time. In The Moment, the fictionalized version of the singer says, “I’m doing [what the label wants] so we can let it die.” To Vanity Fair, Charli XCX said, “I don’t get to decide when it’s over…that’s up to the world.”
Social media has made pop superstardom an increasingly self-referential game. By satirizing Brat’s commercial success, The Moment argues its subject maintains ambivalence to accolades she cannot help but chase. A moment is short, but a memory lasts forever. Cutting your losses, even at the expense of artistic integrity, is the quickest route to immortality.