Charli xcx’s cinema blitz includes seven acting roles and Wuthering Heights’ soundtrack, reinforcing her cultural ubiquity since 2024’s Brat summer. Film remains an adjunct to her sensational avant-electropop, not yet following Lady Gaga’s transition to Oscar-winner and pop part-timer. Pete Ohs’ micro-budget Erupcja anyway trades minimally on her persona, trusting her charisma to underwrite a character who credibly triggers volcanos.
Bethany (Charli xcx) is in Warsaw from London for a weekend during which boyfriend Rob (Will Madden, pictured below left with Charli xcx) means to propose, a prospect which makes her heart plummet. When Mount Etna’s eruption shuts down airspace and grounds them in Poland, Beth seeks refuge with Nel (Lena Góra), an occasional friend since they were teens, whose encounters coincide with volcanos blowing their top. “With him, the earth doesn’t move,” she confides of Rob.
Madden, though American, selflessly embodies English passive-aggressive diffidence, and why nice guys sometimes finish last. Creepily considerate, spineless and smothering in his solicitude, Rob drinks water and plans dates with passion-killing precision. As the Polish-language narrator deadpans: “He had been excited for Bethany to try the codfish croquettes.” Sleeping “like a rock”, he lets Bethany see Nel and slip back at dawn. “They did lots of drugs and danced with strangers,” the narrator notes, though a montage of them careening through red-lit clubs and cobbled streets struggles to communicate frenzy or elation.
As a potentially endless Polish season’s lassitude and latitude sink in (never mind the ease of a London train), foreign climes let everyone switch tracks. Bethany is the disruptor, attractively careless and prone to disappearing, luring Nel away from her flower-shop business and sometime girlfriend Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska), another on-off prospect. Bethany and Nel’s relationship also stays ambiguous, not clearly romantic despite Bethany’s casual jealousy of Ula. Volcanoes may magically represent their explosive bond or, as Rob chides, excuse irresponsibility. Hapless and responsible, his big proposal scene is reduced to showing the ring to strangers on his phone. These days in another town leave him realising that, as Nel tells a similarly slavish male, he needs a new girlfriend, while she also reassesses the appeal of explosions versus stable romance. The main cast contributed Mike Leigh-style to the script during the chronological shoot, aiding these emotionally astute, shifting relationships.
Ohs is a genre-hopping US indie director lately living in Warsaw, encouraging this attempt at what he terms the “foreign film genre”, a Hollywood-centric notion not entirely unfair to the familiar tropes of European arthouse, or Americans abroad there. Blue overlays nod to Kieslowski, and Ohs’ modern comedy of youthful manners references A Midsummer Night’s Dream and infers Erich Rohmer. Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy is another influence, and his Nouvelle Vague’s giddy dream of Godard’s Paris as a playground for youthful adventure parallels Erupcja’s rangy, lo-fi vibe. Ohs’ on the fly screenplay is matched by his freewheeling shoot, a homage to the nouvelle vague minus the radicalism or much beyond an essentially realist milieu. Sharp character truths keep some blood pumping in a coolly inconsequential vignette.
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