There is a tinge of jealousy I feel whenever I listen to Billie Eilish or see anything she’s done. To my knowledge, no one else in our age group has achieved what she has: two Oscars, two Golden Globes, and 10 Grammys in seven years. At 24, she has headlined three world tours and over 300 shows, not counting music festival performances and one-off concerts. Now, she’s expanding her filmography (which is sparse but includes an extra role in 2010’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid) with James Cameron’s Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D).
Cameron has always been a master of spectacle, so much so that his Avatar series is criticized (reductively) by some as “tech demo.” So, it’s no surprise that he would gravitate towards Eilish, whose visual and sonic identity stand out from her female contemporaries in pop. She croons like Lana del Rey but dresses like Travis Scott, and says she wants to emulate the way rappers like him stage shows: just herself onstage, exchanging energies with the crowd.
But even without dancers and costume changes, Eilish knows how to make a concert spectacular. The Hit Me Hard and Soft concert film starts with a time-lapse clip of the stage being set up hours before one of Eilish’s four shows in Manchester, England, in July 2025. The stage sits right at the center of the stadium, and over it hovers a cube of LED panels.
From there, the film skips to the concert intro, during which Eilish emerges from the box, her fans screaming and crying. The lights set the mood, washing Eilish in blue in the opening song “CHIHIRO”, green in Charli XCX’s “Guess,” and red in “bury a friend.” During “LUNCH,” she skips around the stage and winks at her fans, who are dressed in basketball jerseys and bandanas. She reaches her hand out to them, and they sing everything back to her.
The magic of 3D is that it makes the movie feel a little more real, but it isn’t so dizzying here that it becomes distracting. At most, I felt chills. But for the teenager sitting in front of me at the theater, the experience was so immersive that she wouldn’t stop screaming. Does no one know how to conduct themselves in a theater anymore? I thought as she jumped in her seat.
I started to accept that this is just what it’s like to watch a concert film in the cinema when audience members brought their phones out and turned on their flashlights for “Your Power,” and formed a moshpit in “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE.” When Hit Me Hard and Soft jumped to the scenes backstage, a group of young fans went “Boooo.”
But it’s the backstage parts that make the onstage scenes truly pay off. Early into the film, Eilish also tells Cameron backstage that she has always toured with her brother and longtime collaborator, Finneas, and that the Manchester shows would be the first time he didn’t come along with her. But towards the end, after Eilish performs “lovely,” Finneas emerges from backstage and joins his sister for “idontwannabeyouanymore” and “ocean eyes,” the first ever song he wrote for her. I’m sobbing in my seat.
After the encore and confetti, Eilish gets into a black SUV and waves to her fans as she drives off. She says she doesn’t get to go outdoors much when she’s on tour, and so the ride back to the hotel serves as a moment of reprieve. She rolls her window down again and extends an arm out into the quiet night.
Hit Me Hard and Soft achieves the objective of any concert film, which is to humanize the revered pop star-subject. It’s a feat for Eilish to have her concerts immortalized this way and demonstrate just how much work goes into putting on a show. It’s a feat for Cameron, who has always dabbled in the fantastical and melodramatic, to document something real-life (Titanic isn’t a documentary!), take its more unglamorous parts, and still make it magnificent.
Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) is showing exclusively at SM Cinema.
