“Someone has said that we should live each day as if it were the last day of our life.” Christian Bresauler and Ariana Grande’s 2025 short film “Brighter Days Ahead” is a testament that people should live life to the fullest.
The short film was released on March 28, accompanying Grande’s deluxe edition of her album “Eternal Sunshine.” Grande makes her directorial debut and reprises her role of Peaches from her music video “We Can’t Be Friends.”
“Brighter Days Ahead” is set 70 years into the future in a memory erasure and preservation facility named “Brighter Days.” A now elderly Peaches visits the facility to rewatch, then erase four preserved major memories of her lifetime: her early life, life as a pop singer, the destruction of her neighborhood, and her father’s memory of Peaches’ death and revival.
Some parts of the film evoked feelings of melancholy for me, such as the memories of her early life, featuring real home videos from Grande’s childhood and parents’ marriage. Accompanying the scene is Grande’s song “Intro (End of the World),” featuring sanguine lyrics, “If the sun refused to shine / Baby, would I still be your lover? / Would you want me there?”
Grande incorporates themes of her songs into the scenes that occur during the film. During the third memory, the neighborhood destruction scene, “Twilight Zone,” a song featured on the deluxe version, plays alongside the scene where she discovers her house in disarray, symbolizing a broken relationship. Within that same scene, Grande is taken by a UFO to the song “Supernatural,” a symbolic representation of her possibly moving on from the relationship.
I found the final scene emotional, which is Peaches’ father reviving her from her death. Peaches’ father, played by Grande’s father Edward Butera, tries his best to revive Peaches at Brighter Days, in which she awakens after playing the piano. The scene, accompanied by the song “Hampstead,” ends with Peaches and her father playing a piano in a bar, marking the fourth and final memory to be erased.
Grande’s “Brighter Days Ahead” has accumulated 5.8 million views since its release.
The short film is beautifully crafted and its title perfectly describes its message: that there are brighter days ahead. Despite the bad in the memories, an elderly Peaches still embraces these memories before they are erased because of the good that came out of it as well.
“Brighter Days Ahead” is available on YouTube:
