Ariana Grande titled her new short film Brighter Days Ahead, yet the premise of the narrative is that her character’s brightest days are all behind her. Released to accompany the deluxe edition of her 2024 album Eternal Sunshine, Brighter Days Ahead finds an older, mute Peaches back at the same company that once erased her memory of a past relationship. Brighter Days Inc. now offers a new service, preserving memories so you can experience them—and the accompanying emotion—one last time. Nearing the end of her life, Peaches has decided to view her last four memories.
Except even those supposedly “brighter” memories are pretty dark. After some very cute home videos (real clips of Grande’s childhood, featuring parents and grandparents), Peaches seemed to live quite a solitary and somewhat depressing life. In one memory, she stands alone singing (and real-time producing) for digital screens that hold crowds of fans. It’s impossible to forget that the track “we can’t be friends” is about her complicated relationship with the public’s perception of her, or that Grande has very valid concert-related trauma. In another memory, Peaches is alone again, the only human exploring the post-apocalyptic wreckage of the suburbs before getting abducted by a giant UFO.
In her final memory, a newspaper headline tells us Peaches has been torn apart by something; her mad scientist father stitches her body back together like Frankenstein, and the two share a sweet moment at the piano. (Metaphor check: the media may try to tear Grande apart, but the love of her family will always heal.) It’s one of the nicest memories of the bunch, and even that’s pretty macabre. After all that, Peaches’ memories are deleted for good. The storyline is bleak, even though a final video of young Grande—quoting her Wicked predecessor Kristin Chenoweth in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown—encourages us to “live each day as if it were the last day of our life.”
Written and directed by Grande and Christian Breslauer, Brighter Days Ahead features incredible production value plus the pop star’s signature attention to detail, peppered with lots of loving references. Even before she was an Oscar nominee, Grande has been known to include a nod to cinema classics in her videos (see the rom-com romp “thank u next“). Eternal Sunshine took things a step further by name-checking the beloved 2004 film; even her music video character Peaches was a reference to the name of Kate Winslet’s character Clementine. Brighter Days Ahead‘s sci-fi elements recall Minority Report, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and even X-Men (it’s impossible not to think of Professor X in Cerebro when Peaches is being wheeled into that memory chamber). The final memory includes shades of Anastasia, Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas, and of course Frankenstein. If Grande is indeed putting music on the backburner to focus on acting in the next chapter of her career, she can point to Brighter Days Ahead as a testament to her cinematic passions.
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