Excepting the newly bicurious and the chronically polyamorous, most people will adore Erupcja for the wrong reasons. Pete Ohs’ sixth narrative feature has, on the surface, all the ingredients ripe for distilling the contemporary formula for earth-shaking passion. It stars Charli XCX, centers those of a sapphic persuasion, and offers the definitive statement of summer in a brisk but brash mumblecore that sort of elevates the city of Warsaw to stardom. It’s an uber-modern symphony of #YOLO reverberated through the pernicious one-takes of the Letterboxd crowd. Yet there is something irresistible in it to the gaze of those more measured, or at least with a lower threshold of tolerance for infantilized roleplay. As a cultural document, Erupcja is invaluably noteworthy; as a conventional narrative on the pleasures of emotion, it offers bountiful ones of its own.
British couple Bethany (Charli) and Rob (Will Madden) take to the Polish capital on holiday, checking into a nifty four-day stay for the routine, mostly relaxed tourist activities: museum trips, massages, sushi dates — nothing evoking the mental image of the backpacker’s travail. Because Warsaw, familiar to the European sight but exotic in its speech and sounds, evokes that gentle feeling of quaint intermediacy, it becomes the unwitting reflection of a relationship experienced in separate worlds. Rob wants to propose to Bethany, and having agonized over the ideal time and spot to create that perfect spark, ends up postponing the moment indefinitely. Bethany, it seems, couldn’t be more unfazed by Rob’s doting presence, and when they chance upon another anglophone, it’s almost scriptural wisdom that Rob will play some version of the cuck.
How and why that scenario unfolds is eminently captivating, and just as cringeworthy, to behold. Though not wilfully implicated in the happy romance’s undoing, expat Claude (Jeremy O. Harris) impugns Bethany’s inhibitions and Rob’s sense of security when he invites them to his studio for one of his regular hippie hangouts, where Bethany’s soul sister and old flame, Nel (Lena Góra), also appears. Nel runs a flower shop; she and Bethany met many years prior, during one of the latter’s student exchanges; Bethany has, unbeknownst to Rob, spotted Nel before the party, and may even have suggested Warsaw as a travel destination because of her. In what follows, around the film’s halfway mark, the girls predictably reconnect, leaving a morose and increasingly weary Rob to piece together his self-worth in the dust.
Like many a manic pixie dream, Erupcja teems with vertiginous irreverence, its breezy and minimalist images grasping at certain poetry. “Vestiges of our youth,” chimes in the American dilettante in a bid to explain Bethany’s sudden taking off and eventual ghosting of her boyfriend. Without the forces of therapy or religion to make sense of the world, Claude further opines, pseudo-spirituality would have to do: the lore behind Bethany and Nel’s simmering on-off tension stems from the fact that each time they met, a volcano somewhere erupted. Of course, Ohs doesn’t believe this, and nor do his characters. But accountability is anathema to the irony-inured, and like Janicza Bravo’s trenchant and vicious Zola, Erupcja calibrates the volatile register of its cynics with a serene, sincere meta-narrator (Jacek Zubiel) whose presence here ascribes a light, if wistful, air to the proceedings.
Amid morally jaded actors and bratty situationships, Bethany and Rob alike quote from Lord Byron, paramour par excellence: one in somber requiem, the other as callous epiphany. If this risks a revisionist reading of the film, it must be said that Byron’s “Darkness,” whence Erupcja takes its titular inspiration, enjoys a certain ambivalence within it. With Rob, Bethany confesses to Nel, “the earth doesn’t shake and volcanoes don’t erupt,” offering the possibility that Nel’s wild side may have put her off, before dashing it with an offscreen tryst. It’s entirely possible that they aren’t both lesbians, and that no carnal exchange between them took place. But the outcome is sufficient. Byron’s poem, where “the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air,” speaks of limitless cataclysm, the sort that enchants the Romantic imagination but comes full circle to its hapless sinners only the morning after.
Is Erupcja, then, about the perils of postmodernity, of Gen Z unreasonably valorizing their own experiences, or does it slyly yassify, instead, the old fiction of sublimity? Ohs is not so inclined to know, much less tell, but his miniature work entertains the stark notion that, faithful lovers or otherwise, we overestimate faith’s reach in the present day. Mount Etna’s eruptions bookend the start and end of his narrative, illustrated through snappy moodboard filters; the wobble bass cues that precipitate its plot developments, likewise, viscerally convey a mechanical nonchalance toward all things sacred. Brusque in its non-committal strains but beautifully measured in its rhythm, Erupcja paints a portrait not of blunt tumescence, but of woefully decaying idealism. Like volcanoes, it’s spectacular, but not always in a pretty way, and its weakly liberating spectacle foregrounds a terrible but necessary beauty.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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