There’s something all the time scrumptious about public figures keen to play themselves as fools, and Charli’s fictionalized model of herself in The Second is needy, insecure, and simply tragic sufficient to dimly acknowledge her personal vapidity. It doesn’t cease her, although, from letting her label, handlers, and different music trade customers in co-opting the “brat summer season” of 2024 when the movie’s faux-documentary is ready. The sycophants flip a motion within the film into an everyday Madison Avenue Advert Males’s Frankenstein Monster, unleashed this time on the Snapchat technology. But the film from writer-director Aidan Zamiri lacks the humor, creativeness, or fanged menace to let this creature do something too imply, or for that matter humorous, throughout its rampage.
A tonal mixing of ostensible cringe comedy, slow-burn horror completely according to the movie’s personal A24 branding, and the uncanny valley of extreme navel-gazing, there are intermittent scenes of ruthless schadenfreude in The Second. This begins with the movie having greater than a passing resemblance to cult darling mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Faucet within the movie’s opening.
The time is early summer season 2024, and Charli is launched rocking out in what seems to be just like the ruins of a derelict nightclub. Strobing, stylish lights throb over music-video prepared imagery and speedy modifying, evoking the essence of Charli’s onstage and on-line persona. This seems to be a soundstage the place the pop star is constructing the look of her upcoming live performance tour, and floor zero for real-life filmmaker Zamiri to do one thing a bit of playful. Through the opening, the logos of manufacturing corporations and distributors that made his movie attainable, together with 2AM, Studio365, and A24, flash by of their patented brat-green stylings. Shades of the commodification of Charli’s music—together with this film—are already manifest.
But structurally what this self-skewering means proves elusive, because the mockumentary setup of the movie seems to be inexplicably filming the making of one other extra typical live performance film-within-a-film, this one directed by trade veteran and sycophant extraordinaire, Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård). Johannes apparently has a penchant for making the streaming-ready gloss-ups you may affiliate with a Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber. Confusingly, although, The Second turns into a documentary about Skarsgård’s try and make this even thinner slice of onscreen superficiality. In fact the narrative muddiness of this nesting doll construction wouldn’t matter if the movie’s satire of the trendy music trade was as sharp or humorous because it thinks it’s.
Zamiri actually conjures the anxiousness and dread that sustains so many comedy and horror films this decade. Charli’s regular corruption by the banalities of fame and capitalism come throughout as a slow-motion automotive wreck whereas her handlers seduce her into promoting “brat bank cards” to marginalized LGBTQ youngsters on IG and TikTok. In the meantime Johannes slowly pushes out Charli’s most protecting inner-circle, together with BFF artistic director Celeste Collins (Hailey Benton Gates), all so he can vibe-shift the upcoming live performance tour’s nightclub aesthetic into an insipid paean to self-empowerment, and change the phrase cunt on Charli’s live performance stage to the extra parent-friendly b!tc#. “The track is actually about cocaine,” Celeste protests when advised to consider the potential youngsters demographic. “What if the cocaine is a metaphor?!” Johannes suggests, with out a lot rhyme or cause to clarify for what.
Sequences just like the above have an apparent however efficient chunk, as do nearly all of Skarsgård’s overcaffeinated, strained smiles that seem too acute to not be primarily based on an individual or 12 the Swedish actor has met alongside the way in which. The movie additionally will get mileage out of different celebrities keen to play themselves, be it I Love LA’s Rachel Sennott as a jelly cokehead needling Charli in a bar’s toilet, or Kylie Jenner because the superficial excellent for empty fame. The very fact Kylie exhibits up in a bikini and 4K-ready make-up at a spa because the satan on Charli’s shoulder, convincing her to promote her soul to the fits to increase brat summer season’s quarter-hour, exhibits a good quantity of self-awareness and self-deprecation.
