The Exception

Selena Gomez managed something most Disney stars can’t—she got older without imploding into the kind of spectacular disaster everyone half-expected. While the rest of them were having public meltdowns and scandals, she just kept working: made decent music, did weird art films like Spring Breakers, stayed professional enough that nobody took her entirely seriously but not boring enough that anyone stopped watching. It’s a balance almost nobody hits.

So when she made this short film with photographer Petra Collins called A Love Story, posted to Instagram, I wasn’t expecting much. Selena in a bathtub. Soft light. That aesthetic Instagram thing. But what actually happens in the film is genuinely unclear. She’s bathing and falling in love, supposedly—with herself, or maybe with someone else, or maybe with the idea of being desired. The film doesn’t commit to any of these readings, and I’m not sure it knows either. Which could be brilliant or pointless depending on the moment.

It has all the hallmarks of Instagram profundity: beautiful to look at, vague enough to suggest depth, ambiguous enough that everyone can project whatever meaning they want onto it. Some people call it art. Some people think it’s trash. Some people just want to watch her breasts float in bathwater, which—fair. They’re there, no aesthetic distance, nothing hidden. Just present.

What got to me watching it was thinking about what I actually want from her work. She has this blank stare, this kind of cold stillness that feels unsettling. I’d rather see her in something with real darkness—a horror film, something with actual stakes and tension. Not bathwater and soft focus, but something that uses that blankness for something genuinely terrifying. That would be interesting. That would prove something.