ERUPCJA – Review by Sarah Ward
Brat summer came and went in 2024 in a wash of lime green and internet memes. Ever since, it has been cinema season for Charli xcx. The British singer and songwriter’s eruption across the big screen is no mere coincidence, acting in no less than seven films (Erupcja, 100 Nights of Hero, Sacrifice, The Moment, I Want Your Sex, The Gallerist and Faces of Death), and also helping to craft two of them as a writer and producer. (And then there’s her Wuthering Heights soundtrack album.) Such cinematic omnipresence sways with a tingle of fate, like forces colliding and conspiring to give xcx her celluloid moment. Erupcja even ponders how clinging onto patterns can feel exactly that way, and feel magical. Unlike in The Moment, she isn’t satirically stepping into her own shoes in this Warsaw-set romantic drama, but where Erupcja’s biggest name is concerned, it still offers commentary about her current career: that this is where xcx is meant to be right now.
An eruption is also pivotal for Londoner-in-Poland Bethany (xcx), as they always have been since she was 16 and first visited the nation’s capital. Every time that she makes the trip to the city that keeps calling her, including when she initially met now-florist Nel (Lena Góra, King of Dope) as a schoolgirl, a volcano has ejected its lava and ash into the world. Now it is Mount Etna’s turn to oblige, and to prolong her stay. How could a Warsaw holiday by Nel’s side not burst with excitement, then, or cascade with kismet? How easy it is to seize any glimmer of a sign that a bond is special — or a choice or, yes, a moment — is firmly on Erupcja’s mind. How eagerly we grasp, too. Also billowing through the film, which director Pete Ohs (The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick) poises perfectly between lived-in and dreamy in its aesthetic and its mood alike: how quickly reading meaning into randomness and following the exhilaration that it sparks can blow up one’s life, or be used as an excuse to.
Bethany’s latest getaway is with her live-in boyfriend Rob (Will Madden, Downbeat), who has grand plans and a ring secreted in his luggage to back it up. But as soon as she has the chance, she’s absconding solo from their Airbnb while he naps, drawn to Nel like a volcano’s plume to the sky. The first major narrative development that screenwriters Ohs, xcx, Góra, Madden and Jeremy O. Harris (Zola) send Bethany’s way is also the main thrust of the story overall. As much as Rob is desperate to set the scene for his surprise proposal — complete with the trifecta of couples’ massages, intricately planned meals and memorable attractions — she just wants to hop between parties, clubs and 5 AM chat sessions with her true other half. Or, does she just prefer who she is when she believes that every wild and carefree impulse is in the stars? When she’s immersed so enthusiastically in an existence so far from her own? Or, is she simply keen to take any avenue to run from the man that she doesn’t want to marry?
While The Moment beat Erupcja to a general cinema release, the latter preceded the former on the festival scene, and the other five xcx-starring films to grace screens in 2025 and 2026. Kicking off her present run of acting roles, her performance proves a confident and composed opener — also charismatic, convincing and compelling. Add xcx to the list of global music stars who can make an everywoman sing, as Lady Gaga so famously did almost a decade back now in A Star Is Born. Ohs’ collaborative, improvised approach, scripting with his actors (Emily in Paris’ Harris plays American artist Claude) as they shoot, suits the ‘Boom Clap’, ‘Speed Drive’ and ‘360’ talent. Hers isn’t Erupcja’s only magnetic turn; it suits Góra, Madden and Harris, and also Agata Trzebuchowska (Ida) as Nel’s on-and-off love interest Ula, just as cannily.
As Bethany, Nel and Rob each are within its plot, Erupcja is in search of a feeling. Found in Translation might make a nice alternative title for the film, which would undoubtedly pair well with Lost in Translation. Also furnished with a struggling romance and an eye-opening attachment, Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winner similarly embraced how slipping into the rhythm of a different city can be revelatory not only in its sights and encounters, but via what it unveils and reflects about oneself. Ohs, who lenses and edits alongside directing, co-writing and producing, knows that he’s telling a familiar tale, and a relatable one. Ensuring that feeling leaps from the screen is part of the search. Polish-language narration by the unseen Jacek Zubiel, which is both insightful and poetic, adds to the sense that everyone watching can also see themselves in Erupcja’s freewheeling frames. Literally colouring the feature with intermittent vivid full-screen splashes adds to the thrill as well.
Meaning is what you make of it, of course — a sentiment true of a committed cast and crew bringing a thoughtful and intimate story about a combustible connection to life, and engagingly, and also for anyone letting coincidence, a new city or another person shape their sense of self. Volcanos erupt often around the planet. While writing this review, in fact, news arrived of Hawaii’s Kīlauea doing just that. Erupcja perhaps shouldn’t be able to have it both ways, to revel in heated intensity and blazing joys, and to be searingly aware that almost everything that Bethany, Nel and Rob are feeling about their relationships, Warsaw, serendipity and eruptions is projection. It probably shouldn’t manage that feat while being as rich as it is light across its 71 minutes. And yet it does, all while making xcx’s cinema flare up feel not just destined but, so far, a blast.
