To be fair, the night was already ill-suited for sustained attention — we were passing a bottle of prosecco around, and one of my friends was waiting for a boy to text her back. I itched for my phone and could see its rectangular outline on the table. Out of stubborn conviction I refused to reach for it. But the spell was broken. The small moments that established the characters’ relationships to one another, the tense encounters and tender silence, all captured by the slow, roving sweep of the camera, vanished unrecoverably. We had blinked, and we had missed it.
For many people, movies are getting harder and harder to watch. Attention spans are in a tailspin. Mobile-first, short-form content is rapidly overtaking streaming. Even film students — film students — are struggling to sit through the classics, glancing down surreptitiously at their phones, fidgeting in their seats, or forgoing in-person screenings altogether to watch the movies at double speed.
It’s difficult to overstate just how addictive short-form content can be. A survey from YouGov released earlier this month reported that 85 percent of people ages 16 to 24 watch short-form content at least weekly. Seven in 10, instead of watching the full version of a TV show or movie, settle for clips on social media. On TikTok, you can swipe through entire seasons of “Suits” or “Scandal” in 2x speed or watch “Interstellar” in dozens of two-minute parts. Usually the most shocking, intense, and dramatic scenes are highlighted for your viewing pleasure.
Increasingly, young people are using short-form clips to discover new material, too — and the movies that do best on social media are the ones that can be pared down into bite-sized videos. It’s the kind of media that you can enjoy while scrolling on the subway or while eating lunch at work.
Even streaming services are adapting to fit this new model. Netflix seems to be increasingly pandering to the “casual viewer,” a consumer archetype who has the TV on in the background as they scroll their phone or do some other task, with easy-to-follow dialogue and uncomplicated storylines.
This isn’t to say that all movies and shows should demand our unbroken attention, all the time. It’s perfectly acceptable to clean your room with “The Bachelorette” blaring forgettably in the background. What’s troubling is when we lose the patience to sit through media that really does merit thought and attention.
Watching a film like “Sentimental Value” — where the director, the ever-perceptive Joachim Trier, points his audience’s attention to every creak of a floorboard or barely perceptible flicker of emotion on a person’s face — requires a focus that has been slowly corroded by the short form. My friends and I agreed that we experienced a near-somatic response watching the just over two-hour film: restlessness, an inability to sit still, the feeling of being on edge. Every sluggish movement of the camera or scene where very little happened felt painfully stultifying.
A 2025 study by the American Psychological Association offers a cognitive explanation for the jitters that my friends and I experienced: Short-form video habituates the brain to rapid stimuli, reducing its capacity to stay focused on the slower and more demanding. There’s a popular term for it that’s pretty self-explanatory: “brainrot.”
Realizing just how bad things have gotten, some in my generation, including me, are trying to turn toward long-form. “Media that I’ve consumed this week without doomscrolling” is a nascent trend documenting the books, movies, and TV shows that a segment of Gen Zers are privileging over short-form. Opal, the screen-time management app, has more than 4 million users and a suite of imitators: one sec, ScreenZen, Useless. The Brick is a physical gadget that blocks apps on your phone. Mine just arrived in the mail.
Movies like “Sentimental Value” cannot be pared down into clips on social media. They require presence from start to finish — to tell when a character is struggling to hold back tears, to find meaning in a quick look shared between two people.
At the end of the film, in what seems like a 10-minute-long stretch of silence, a character walks slowly from one room to another. She glances up at the ceiling. She closes the door behind her. Each movement is suffused with meaning. But you have to be paying attention.