If you are a Billie Eilish fan, this would be a great film to watch of your music idol, but if you aren’t a Billie Eilish fan, watching this concert film might just make you one. With James Cameron behind the camera, the director who gave us the Oscar winning ‘Titanic’, expect this to be one of his titanic projects in concert film making as he takes you zooming in 3D style across the stage to give you 114 minutes of a nonstop turbocharged performance by Billie Eilish who literally completes just a decade in her music career.

The concert film was shot at two arenas during Eilish’s ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour’, one in Manchester, England, and the other in Phoenix, Arizona. Both venues had stunning stage setups with the layout in such a way that every fan in the arena saw Eilish’s every move as she performed at each quadrant. Eilish performs on a stage that’s a long rectangle situated in the middle of the arena floor. There are two square holes within the stage that accommodate her band members and backup singers. Aside that you also have tunnels below the stage that transports her from one stage to another. The best part you get to watch the tunnel run up to the stages with hand held cameras. This is really exciting for a concert goer to see the inside of the stage setup.

In between concert performances, impromptu interview segments between Cameron and Eilish are sprinkled throughout the film. You can get to hear why Eilish actually does her own hair and makeup, why she doesn’t really think she needs dancers in her concerts. Her reason for this is that the simpleton that she is, feels that she dances like one of us. That same feeling goes for the attire she chooses to wear on stage. While you have other female artists in concerts we have seen over the years, strut around in revealing clothes, here you have Eilish in her baseball cap, basketball short pants and baggy athletic jersey (with the inscription Hard and Soft), while she struts, runs, and sings on stage. One of the standouts is when she finishes her concert and heads to the hotel in her car. She reveals how she can smell the air and breathe freely. The behind-the-scenes glimpses also include conversations of the stage setup with Cameron and the tour’s creative development.

As for the music, you’ll have all the top hits Eilish is so famous for, going back to Ocean Eyes, her first DIY collaboration with her brother Finneas O’Connell, to featuring tracks from the album ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’, along with hits like What Was I Made For?’, to rocking the house with the catchy Bad Guy, or pouring herself into the melancholy rapture of TV, or digging into the jaunty hook of Bury a Friend (with its echo of “This Jesus Must Die” – a vocal sample in the chorus from the musical ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’), Lunch, CHIHIRO and THE GREATEST, among many others. There are occasional other people on stage, like her backup singers, Jane and Ava, who she introduces as friends and also Finneas, who makes a cameo appearance with his sister on two songs. There’s also a moment when she asks the audience to be silent as she moves on to the song When the party’s over. Here we find Eilish, sitting on the floor of the stage, while the packed house is in pin drop silence.

Cameron’s camera work is spot on and you can feel the true collaboration between him and the singer who are ages apart but come together for one goal to make this concert film as memorable as it can. Barely in her mid 20, Eilish is one of our youngest pop artists around and Cameron one of the oldest and most venerated filmmakers to ever to take on a project of this magnitude. His collaboration is clearly on her terms when he jokes with the superstar when he says, “The credits are gonna read, ‘Directed by Billie Eilish’, and then in small print below, ‘and James Cameron’. It just shows the reverence that Cameron has for the vision of Eilish and him in turn bringing her idea of this concert film alive. Eilish for her side picks up the camera while on stage, adding her own fun element, tugging along a portable 3D camera to provide unique perspectives from the stage, close up views of her and getting you front row footage you would rarely see.

We see glimpses of her struggles with show injuries, scratches on her arms, sprained ankles, confessions about being a female artist to her love for pets where we see her visit a local shelter home for dogs, where she claims “Everyone needs some dog love,”. 

‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ is one of those 3D movies where the images don’t really pop out at us, unlike other 3D films, but you do feel immersed in the concert, feeling a part of it. “I want to be the kind of artist I would be a fan of,” Eilish tells Cameron in one of their interactions and rightly so, Eilish as a true songwriter, artist and live performer lives up to what she says.

‘Billie Eilish Hit Me Hard and Soft: the Tour’ (Live in 3D) concert movie will hit the Indian theatres on 15th May 2026.

Directed by: James Cameron and Billie Eilish.

Running time: 144 minutes

Rating: *****

Reviewed by Verus Ferreira