ERUPCJA Review

Let me tell you about Rob.

Rob (Will Madden) is the kind of guy who plans things. He books restaurants in advance. He reads the reviews. He wanted to propose in Paris, which tells you everything you need to know about Rob: he is a good man, a careful man, a man who believes that love deserves a proper setting. He has a ring. He has a speech, probably. He had a whole vision of how the story was supposed to go.

What Rob didn't have was a girlfriend who was anywhere near the same page. Or the same book. Or the same library, really.

Bethany (Charli XCX in a sly, half-awake brilliance that I did not see coming) talked Rob out of Paris into Warsaw instead. Not even Kraków, which at least has castles and charm and the decency to be on a tourist map. Warsaw. And somewhere between the flight, the rental flat and the party on their second night, Bethany slipped out the door and never came back. She went to find Nel (Lena Góra), a flower shop owner she's been having a decade-long biannual emotional explosion with. Rob spent the next several hours scouring the city for his almost-fiancée, alone, holding a ring he never got to use. He was saved in her phone next to the emoji of a guy raising his hand. That emoji is a eulogy, not a contact name.

This is Erupcja, Pete Ohs gorgeous wispy 71-minute portrait of a woman having the most quietly devastating awakening of her life in a city that doesn't speak her language. I walked out feeling like someone had held a mirror up to every selfish, sign-seeking decision I've ever talked myself into. It's the kind of film that makes you laugh, then makes you go quiet, then makes you text someone you probably shouldn't.

What keeps it from becoming insufferable is how Ohs refuses to judge any of it. A narrator drifts above the action like a bemused philosopher, reading Bethany's inner life back to us without ever wagging a finger. The film doesn't ask you to root for her or condemn her. It just watches her the way you'd watch a friend make a decision you know is wrong and say nothing, because deep down you understand exactly why they're doing it.

Charli XCX, I owe you an apology because I underestimated you completely. She plays Bethany with this somnambulant, quietly magnetic quality, like someone who only feels fully conscious when doing something slightly reckless in a foreign country. She recited Lord Byron on the floor of Nel's apartment directly into the camera and it has no right to work as well as it does. The casting is also quietly brilliant on a metatextual level: a pop star famous for burning her own life down and calling it art, playing a woman who blows up her relationship and calls it destiny.

Erupcja is small, unhurried, and occasionally a little too pleased with itself. But it understands something true and uncomfortable: sometimes the most selfish thing you do ends up being the only honest thing you've done in years. Sometimes the volcano goes off and you think: finally, something on the outside that matches the inside.

Rob deserved better. Bethany needed this. Both things are true, and the film is wise enough to hold them at the same time.

🍿 SCORE = 74/100