The Moment

The Hangover After the Party

The first thing you see is spit. A glob of phlegm hits the camera lens, hawked up by Charli xcx before the title card even lands. It’s a brutally unglamorous way into a movie obsessed with the suffocating pressure of glamour.

Then the strobe lights kick in. For what feels like forever, Aidan Zamiri bombards us with flashing corporate logos, Beats, Aperol, Atlantic Records, flickering fast enough to sear themselves into your eyes. I had to glance away. That opening tells you exactly what kind of experience *The Moment* wants to be: a jittery, meta-fictional mockumentary about what happens when something once underground gets swallowed by the boardroom.



This is Zamiri’s feature debut after a wildly successful run directing music videos, and you can feel that background all over the film’s frantic, deeply online visual language. But instead of stretching a glossy ad into feature length, he turns his eye on the machinery itself. The story unfolds in a strange alternate timeline, right after the all-consuming "Brat summer" of 2024, with Charli preparing for an arena tour while executives circle around her, desperate to squeeze every last drop out of the moment.

Most of the movie keeps us boxed inside a drab East London rehearsal space. It’s claustrophobic by design. Charli is hemmed in by a circus of indecisive managers, including a delightfully frantic Jamie Demetriou, and haughty label reps like Rosanna Arquette, who seems to be having a great time. Nobody really speaks to her. They speak *at* her, lobbing corporate nonsense while she disappears deeper into oversized hoodies. The only real point of steadiness is her creative director, Celeste. Hailey Benton Gates plays her with a quiet, worn-down patience that the film badly needs.



And then there’s Alexander Skarsgård. He plays Johannes, a pretentious, manspreading concert film director brought in by the label to sand down the tour into something family friendly. After so many roles where he’s either terrifying or stoic, watching him go full absurdist here is genuinely strange in the best way. He uses his size brilliantly. Every room gets smaller when he walks in. He looms over Charli, pitching sterile, focus-grouped ideas that feel completely at war with what her music actually is.

At heart, this really isn’t a comedy. *The Guardian* described it as "less Spinal Tap and more Black Swan, a ragged, borderline horror film of cracking under the pressure of getting what you want." That feels dead on. The camera is all nerves, constantly vibrating with the panic of an artist realizing she has become a product. You watch Charli’s body gradually fold in on itself under the pressure of branded credit card launches and endless meetings. She doesn’t come off like a pop star. She looks like a hostage.



There are stretches where the film’s all-consuming cynicism starts to wear you down. Zamiri leans so hard on internet fluency and insider references that the emotional line occasionally slips out of focus. (If you weren’t online in 2024, whole scenes may as well arrive untranslated). But right when that distance starts to set in, the movie lowers its guard.

By the end, *The Moment* leaves behind a weird, heavy sadness. It turns the concert documentary, usually packaged as a clean little story of empowerment, into something closer to corporate surveillance. By the time the credits hit, the party is well and truly over. What’s left is the cleanup crew and the confetti on the floor.