Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film review – a cacophonous testament to megastardom

The concert film captures 2023’s biggest pop culture event with breathless fervour and crystal clarity – honing in on the details easily missed in the live show

Taylor Swift, whose billion-dollar Eras tour redirected the flow of commerce and social media this summer, has fashioned herself as 2023’s main character. With the global release of her concert film, the 33-year-old singer is arguably teetering on the brink of overexposure. It’s also her most cogent and immersive argument against it – a near-exact replica of the stadium show that reinforced her inexhaustible talent and undeniable status as pop’s pre-eminent songwriter.

Swift has hailed the concert film, filmed over three nights at LA’s SoFi Stadium in August, as “the perfect capture of what this show was like for me”. That’s a bit of a misnomer. The film assumes Swift’s rarefied perspective for just a tantalisingly few moments, gazing from behind her into tens of thousands of blinking, screaming lights. Save for a few snippets of the audience – mostly young women, mostly shrieking or singing or in tears, all devoted – this is a film of Swift, in hyper-definition and from seemingly every possible angle.