7 hours ago
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Editor’s note: This review was originally published during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. 1-2 Special releases “Erupcja” in select theaters starting April 17, 2026, with expansion to follow.
A 71-minute wisp of a film that moves and sounds like a cartoon wind curlicue, Pete Ohs’ “Erupcja” — the Polish word for “eruption” — was (clearly) shot with half an outline and scripted on the fly, to the point that all four of its main actors are credited as co-writers as well. Here, that approach proves a bit more pointed than it did in the director’s previous “Jethica” and “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick,” as its elevated mumblecore energy suits the unformed and searching nature of a wherever you go, there you are story about the ways that people try to make sense of the world around them in real-time.
People like Bethany (Charli xcx, a sly and natural screen presence), a British girl who’s convinced that a volcano explodes whenever she blows up her life for a biannual fling with flower shop owner Nel (Lena Góra) in Warsaw. Her puppy dog-like boyfriend Rob (Will Madden) wanted to propose to her in Paris, but when Bethany suggested they go to Poland instead — and not even Kraków, with all of its historic charm — some part of her was expecting the planet to crack open when they got there, as if the Earth itself were responding to her fears of heteronormative complacency.
Sure enough, Mount Etna erupts soon after the couple settles into their rental flat, and Bethany takes it as a sign to slip away from her almost-fiancé at a party one night (what else could it possibly be?), ghosting Rob and his well-planned itinerary in favor of another fiery tryst with Nel. Goodbye sleepy conversations at guidebook-recommended restaurants, hello all-night drug sprees followed by pre-dawn poetry recitations (sex is implied, I suppose, but Ohs’ movie is too airy and ethereal to show anything as physical as a kiss).
Is it “brat” to disappear from your dutiful boyfriend in the middle of the trip he planned for you, knowing full well that you’ve abandoned him to miserably scour the city for any trace of his would-be future wife? I’m not really sure, to be honest, but sometimes a girl just has to listen to the universe, even if it’s really more of a self-absorbed echo chamber. Besides, it’s probably never a great idea to marry someone who’s saved in your contacts next to the emoji of a guy raising his hand — nobody wants to marry the emoji of a guy raising his hand.
Ohs, who recently moved to Poland himself, is fascinated by the transformative power of being in a foreign space, and by the process through which people — be they transplants or just tourists — try to reconcile who they are to the new reality around them, and “Erupcja” drifts along with the detachedness of an out-of-body experience. Claude (Jeremy O. Harris as an extroverted American painter who meets Bethany and Rob by chance at a sushi restaurant) is probably the closest thing the director has to a surrogate in this story, and at one point the camera finds him pontificating about how “Being immersed in a culture so different from my own helps me turn my brain off so I can enter a dream state more naturally.”
Slight as it is, “Erupcja” crystallizes that condition to a tee. And while Ohs might point to “Celine and Julie Go Boating” and “Alice in the Cities” as his main sources of inspiration for this project, there’s something very “‘Lost in Translation’ by way of Hong Sang-soo” about how Bethany — subsumed into a waking dreamstate that still feels like real life to all of the people buzzing around her — starts to understand herself more legibly now that she’s in another country where she’s forced read the subtitles (figuratively for her, literally for us). To that end, Charli xcx’s casting adds a metatextual richness to the movie and vice-versa, as the friction between her pop star persona and Bethany’s somnambulant everywoman deepens the sense of a woman divided between the superreal and the literal, the spectacular and the mundane.
“Erupcja” sustains that tension by adhering to a kind of semi-heightened non-logic, as in the very Rivette-like sequence where Bethany invisibly stalks Nel halfway across the city without being noticed. The film’s non-judgmental narration — read by Jacek Zubiel — comments on the characters’ innermost thoughts along the way, adding to the general patina of narcissism without pointing fingers or placing blame.
It’s a (potentially liberating) narcissism that Bethany may never have allowed herself while stuck in the gauziness of her day-to-day existence. Does Bethany not hear the cautionary self-absorption that’s baked into the Lord Byron poem she recites directly to camera on the floor of Nel’s apartment, or is that the only place where she might have ever related to “Darkness”? Did she have to come to Poland to have an easily interpretable relationship dream about being stuck aboard a speeding train, or did she just have to come to Poland in order to remember it when she woke up? And is Nel capable of sharing in Bethany’s selfish dislocation, or is the reality of being in her own home — where she’s regularly visited by the semi-jilted girl she’s dating (“Ida” star Agata Trzebuchowska) — too grounding to buy into the myth that she and Bethany have been telling each other for the last 10 years or so?
“Erupcja” is too breezy a film to conclusively answer such questions, but it lingers in spite of its lightness because it understands how the self-centeredness of travel can cut both ways. And, for that matter, how a little bout of main character syndrome might give someone the perspective they need to save them from becoming a subplot in their own life.
Grade: B
“Erupcja” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
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