If you haven’t seen A Star Is Born, I’ll avoid spoilers for as long as I can then flag when you can jump out of this article to protect yourself.
But I’ll expect it’s fair ground (seeing as you have clicked on this article) to discuss the fact that the end of this movie is extremely confrontational, and that needs to be flagged to audiences before they choose to watch.
A Star is Born was a really heartbreakingly beautiful movie that really could have used a trigger warning.
— keller (@kellerfields) October 5, 2018
The film has an R rating in America, though was awarded an M rating by Australia that was carried over to New Zealand.
After feedback from audiences complaining of being “severely triggered” by the explicit scenes near the end of the film, New Zealand’s classification board has added a more specific warning to the film.
(I’m going to say what that warning is so if you really don’t want to know, this is your cue.)
New Zealand’s classification now flags that there are scenes dealing with suicide in the film, and it’s absolutely wild that that wasn’t flagged in the first place. The content is explicit and harrowing and left a lot of viewers (including myself), distraught.
The debate over plot spoilers vs. trigger warnings is an ongoing and complex one, but I think it’s fairly obvious that mental health needs to take precedent. Having the inclusion of suicide scenes explicitly called out in the classification is actually quite easy to avoid if you hate spoilers, but very important for people who are seeking out this kind of information.
There are a lot of people who specifically avoid that content for mental health reasons, and there is an obligation to give those viewers an opportunity to choose not to put themselves in the position of having to see it.