Ariana Grande goes on quite the journey in her new Brighter Days Ahead short film, which arrived Friday morning (March 28), just hours after the release of the pop star’s deluxe Eternal Sunshine album.
In the 26-minute visual co-directed by Grande and Christian Breslauer, the two-time Grammy winner sings selections from both the original Eternal Sunshine tracklist and the deluxe. Opening with a very elderly Grande — aged to look decades older through makeup and special effects — returning to the Brighter Days memory-wiping center first seen in her 2024 “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)” music video, the film explains to viewers by way of a cheerful spokesperson that the clinic now has the technology to let patients relive some of their life’s best moments.
A nurse then rolls Grande — whose character is named Peaches — into a high-tech room, where she watches her favorite memories one at a time on massive surrounding screens. She starts by viewing clips of herself as a child, singing and dancing with her mom, dad, brother Frankie Grande and grandparents, before clicking over to footage of herself in her pop star days, performing title track “Eternal Sunshine” on a looper and new song “Dandelion” for crowds of thousands of fans.
The film gets more emotional from there, with the Wicked star singing “Twilight Zone” and “Supernatural” as she steps through the wreckage of a destroyed house she seemingly used to share with an ex before walking outside into an apocalyptic scene, where a UFO lurks over the neighborhood and eventually beams her up. “Hampstead” soundtracks the final memory sequence Peaches chooses to watch, which finds her father — played by real-life dad Ed Butera — stitching her body back together Frankenstein-style in his fledgling Brighter Days office, revealing that he is evidently the founder of the clinic his daughter visits years in the future.
Grande first dropped Eternal Sunshine in March 2024, and it spent two weeks atop the Billboard 200. Two of its singles — “Yes, And?” and “We Can’t Be Friends” — reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The star first revealed that she would be releasing a short film inspired by the project March 12. A new description of the project describes the film as exploring “love, loss, growth and the fleeting nature of memory, delivering a heartfelt cinematic experience that closes the door on this eternal sunshine album era.”
Watch Grande’s Brighter Days Ahead short film above.
