The Official Release Party of a Showgirl’ Review

There is a line that tends to get trotted out whenever some big-budget, high-profile piece of IP flops hard. “I made this for the fans, not the critics,” they’ll huff, conveniently dividing the lovers, who’ll eat up anything they’re given, from the haters, who want only to complain.

I doubt if Taylor Swift, an artist who reacted to Reputation’s Grammys underperformance with a firm “I just need to make a better record,” has ever earnestly tried to float this excuse. To the contrary: Her new album, the short, upbeat, Max Martin-produced The Life of a Showgirl, feels almost as much like a reaction to complaints about 2024’s The Tortured Poets Society being too long or too mopey or too Jack Antonoff-y as it does a spontaneous outpouring of love for arena tours or Travis Kelce.

Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, on the other hand, is a different story. Playing only one weekend in theaters, the 89-minute cinematic experience — neither visual album nor concert film, and not quite a documentary — is strictly for the diehards. But while there’s something to be said for the communal experience of absorbing an album surrounded by dozens of likeminded fans, what’s actually being served up on screen is more filler than killer.

The event functions first and foremost as a splashy debut for the Swift-directed music video for “The Fate of Ophelia,” the first song off the new record. It plays not once but twice, bookending the entire endeavor. In between are snippets from the making-of, buffeting kaleidoscopic lyric videos for the album’s other 11 tracks — each of which pull from the same pool of costumes and sets seen in “Ophelia.”

The good news is that the video itself is quite wonderful, among the best of Swift’s self-directed music videos. Shot by Rodrigo Prieto (the Barbie and Killers of a Flower Moon cinematographer who previously worked with her on videos for “Fortnight” and “Cardigan,” among others), it twirls through a century’s worth of showgirl-ing, following Swift as she pivots from a model posing for a John Everett Millais-esque painting to a performer in a Busby Berkeley-style musical to a singer in a ’60s cabaret, and so on. The costumes are dazzling, the sets extravagant, the choreography (by Mandy Moore) sharp and the transitions seamless; it’s a feast for the eyes that I look forward to seeing yet again once it’s officially online Sunday, Oct. 7.

It’s the rest of the show that underwhelms. Swift introduces each new track, occasionally with a crumb of background info or a funny little joke to offer. My audience guffawed knowingly when Swift claimed with a straight face but a twinkle in her eye that “Wood,” a Jackson Five-inflected ode to her fiancé’s apparently tree-sized endowment, is really about superstition. (The explanation is made slightly more plausible by family-friendly tweaks to the album’s lyrics, which include changing “open my thighs” to “open my skies.”)

But those looking for insight into the album’s sonic references or real-life inspirations are better off combing through the analyses that critics and fans alike have been putting up for the better part of a day at this point. What Swift herself has to offer here are mostly surface-level summaries and vague platitudes. The Easter-egg specificity of her writing has earned her a reputation as an over-sharer, but any intimacy here is limited to lines you’ve surely already heard if you’re curious enough to read about the release party — and even then, I’d argue that The Life of a Showgirl ranks among her less intensely personal, less lyrically precise works.

Granted, the release party was never billed as a documentary along the lines of Miss Americana or Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé. But it’s still something of a letdown that nothing here rises above the level of a YouTube clip on an artist’s official channel. Certainly, nothing here feels worth driving to the theater and shelling out $12 plus popcorn for.

At least, that is, if you’re just going for the not-quite-movie. Because as with the Eras Tour movie, the real reason to attend is to be among your tribe — and indeed, my 1 p.m. showing was filled with clusters of friends in orange sequins or tour merch, eager to accept whatever our pop goddess had to give.

Swift, too, knows this is why you’re here. “I hope you sing along,” she says in a brief intro before the show properly gets underway. Not many actually did at my screening, though, which made for a pleasant but hardly unmissable experience — and which, in turn, made me wonder about the limits of her power. As much as her deftness with a pen or the sweetness of her voice, Swift’s commercial success has been built on an almost preternatural ability to sell, whether it be merch, concert tickets, or special-edition album release after special-edition album release. But even deep pockets have their bottoms. I’m a fan, if only a casual one, and The Official Release Party of a Showgirl might be the first time I’ve felt the beginnings of buyer’s remorse.