Charli xcx’s Brat movie marks the moment the mockumentary died | Zach Schonfeld

Spoof documentaries once skewered subjects by dialling comic ingenuity up to 11, but the genre has stagnated – replaced by showbiz puff pieces and right-wing provocations. Has their time passed?

In the satirical mockumentary The Moment, Charli xcx fears (and eventually embraces) the death of Brat summer, the cultural sensation that made her sixth album a phenomenon. But the film – which stars the singer as a fictionalised version of herself – strains to land jokes out of Charli’s identity crisis and lacks the giddily intoxicating rush of that 2024 album. Watching The Moment shortly after its lukewarm reception at Sundance, I sensed something dying, but it wasn’t Brat – it was the mockumentary style itself.

How did mockumentaries grow so … tiresome? Once a novel narrative format brilliantly deployed by directors such as Christopher Guest and the late Rob Reiner, the mockumentary now feels nearly as stale as the formulaic films it aims to lampoon. It’s a sad state of affairs. For much of the last half-century, faux-documentary film-making flourished under the perverse minds of countless comedy greats, from Monty Python’s Eric Idle, who lampooned Beatlemania with 1978’s wackily irreverent mock-doc The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, to Albert Brooks, who made his directorial debut with 1979’s proto-reality television spoof Real Life.