By Esther Zuckerman

One of the people you're most likely to see at a film festival these days is Charli XCX. At Cannes, last year, she was dropping into parties and screening films. At TIFF, she took the red carpet for multiple premieres. And now she's showing up in the wintery wonderland of Park City to inaugurate what might be her biggest year to date when it comes to her cinematic pursuits.

In 2014, Charli XCX made her first major foray into Hollywood. The pop star released the punchy love song Boom Clap as a single off the soundtrack for the teen weepy The Fault in Our Stars. In the music video, directed by Sing J. Lee, footage of Charli bopping around Amsterdam in red lipstick and skintight leopard pants is intercut with clips of terminally ill Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort falling in love. Charli has her typical club kid nonchalant air, but it's all a bit saccharine.

More recently, Boom Clap has become a punchline for Charli XCX. In the A24-produced series Overcompensating, which was released last year, she plays a heightened version of herself who rails at her manager, "You think I want to play fucking 'Boom Clap' in a fucking college?" Boom Clap also makes an appearance as a gag in The Moment, the mockumentary she cooked up alongside director Aidan Zamiri, which is premiering as one of the most anticipated titles at Sundance.

The more-than-10-year-old song with its twee video featuring faux handwritten lyrics superimposed on her face is a good shorthand for how much Charli has evolved as an artist. To her, it's the equivalent of an embarrassing outfit you wore in high school. Sure, Boom Clap is a catchy song and The Fault in Our Stars is a solid adaptation of its YA material—look, I cried—but the Charli of today is not going to appear as an accessory to a commercial enterprise these days.

Instead, Charli has emerged as an artist who is committed to melding her own vision with filmmakers who understand her quest to pursue her craft on her own terms. She's in the process of establishing herself as a performer-auteur who crosses media with her work in visual media and music being one and the same.

The release of the The Moment at Sundance is the clearest expression of Charli's intentions, both her most significant emergence into the world of film to date, and a closing of the book on the Brat era that has defined her past two years.

Charli wrote great songs prior to 2024's Brat on albums like 2019's Charli and mixtapes like 2017's cult hit Pop 2, but Brat itself was a triumph of both songwriting and imagery. Charli has made viral hits before, like the savvy pink-saturated video for Boys, her coquettish track about getting distracted by cute guys, but that was too soft to permeate in any meaningful way. She needed something harder. Brat calcified Charli's cool girl ethos with its abrasive green color and in the video for the lead single 360, directed by Zamiri.

Before launching into her song, in which she purrs "I'm everywhere I'm so Julia," she holds a summit of "hot internet girls" including models but also indie film mainstays like Bottoms co-writer and star Rachel Sennott and the aforementioned Julia Fox, who broke out in Uncut Gems. In a mic drop appearance, Chloë Sevigny emerges from a car late into the video, a sign that Charli has a sense of legacy in the realm of fashionable women who emit an undefinable cool. Everyone on screen wears monochrome, and their eyes pierce the lens like they could kill you with their stilettos. Zamiri directs to the song's propulsive beat, cutting between scenarios where Charli stomps through chaos. It's infectious.

But what gets lost in the Brat narrative often is how Charli's storytelling drives the arc of the album. Yes, there are songs about doing cocaine and partying 365 days a year, but there are also ballads about the confusion of being in your 30s and feeling deep insecurity around other women. Listening is a cinematic experience on songs like Girl, so confusing, about the anxiety of female friendship, or I think about it all the time where Charli questions whether or not she wants to have a baby. You become invested in the narrative of Charli's twin selves: The one drawn to hedonism and the one prone to overanalysis.

This conflict seeps through into The Moment, which uses the aesthetics of Brat—strobe lights, the beats of producer A.G. Cook, handheld camera work by Sean Price Williams—to self-interrogate. It's both self-consciously a vanity project and someone who wants to challenge themselves to turn that into a real piece of art.

Unlike other pop stars who seem to be interested in showing up in film to bolster their own brand, Charli has made efforts to make it clear that she is a true cinephile. Her much discussed Letterboxd account reveals there's a studious bent to her watching habits. In quick succession she watched Husbands and Wives and Love and Death, clearly on a Woody Allen kick. She logs new releases and notes that she caught Mamoru Oshii's 1985 Angel's Egg at the Egyptian. She obviously loves M. Night Shyamalan based on her reviews and ratings.

The filmmakers she has chosen to work with show that she has a similar curiosity when it comes to lending her image to artists. At Sundance, she's also in Gregg Araki's long-awaited return with I Want Your Sex. It's a match made in heaven: Araki's brand of innately fabulous provocation is in line with Charli's own. Even more curiously she's represented a third time at the festival in Cathy Yan's The Gallerist. Later this year, she'll release Pete Ohs's New Wave-inflected Erupcja, filmed on the streets of Warsaw, where she downplays her aura to play a woman who seeks reconnection with an old flame despite the presence of her doting boyfriend. It's an act of blending in, becoming part of the fabric of a story she wants to contribute to telling even as she maintains the allure that has helped her rise to global stardom.

Her other major 2026 cinematic project is something else entirely. She composed an album of songs to accompany Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights. The first single House has none of Brat's throbbing beats. Instead, it's a plaintive, string-driven dirge with a spoken word poem by John Cale. For Charli, it's a musical reinvention in the style of how she perceives Fennell's interpretation of Emily Brontë's text.

Charli has always been a scholar. In her youth, when she was a teen breakout on Myspace invited to play in clubs she couldn't get into, she was a scholar of pop music, a prodigy of a songwriter who understood melody and hooks in ways that defied her years. With her ascension to mainstream success, she graduated from perpetual acolyte to a leader in her field, someone who knew what an audience wanted: A language they could grab onto both sonically and visually.

Now she's turning her attention elsewhere: Learning how she can shapeshift for cinema. She'll probably master that, too.