{"id":900648,"date":"2026-04-17T12:28:34","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T12:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/900648\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T12:28:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T12:28:34","slug":"erupcja-review-charli-xcx-enriches-pete-ohs-low-key-charmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/900648\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Erupcja’ Review: Charli XCX Enriches Pete Ohs’ Low-Key Charmer\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOnly a species suffering from terminal main character syndrome would, when describing intimately human experiences like love, reach for the language of global cataclysm. Tsunami, earthquake, meteor strike, volcano: We\u2019re barely in love at all unless our metaphor is a natural catastrophe with the potential for mass devastation. Pete Ohs<\/a>\u2018 \u201cErupcja<\/a>\u201d (Polish for eruption) is peppered with pyroclastic clouds and mountaintops belching glowing rivulets of lava. But in both slight story and lo-fi form, it\u2019s a denial of the grandiose notion that the massive forces of geological transformation might exist merely to reflect the wonky workings of the human heart. Volcanoes, like stars and tides and changing seasons, don\u2019t give a damn.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a bittersweet point he\u2019s making, but the splashier irony of Ohs\u2019 film is that Bethany, the Londoner adrift in Poland who must learn the hard lesson that it\u2019s not all about her, is played by Charli XCX<\/a> \u2014 one of the few people on the planet whom, less than two years after her generation-defining \u201cBrat\u201d album, it could legitimately all be about. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut while there are a bunch of tried-and-tested, PR-strategized ways to parlay pop stardom into movie stardom, none of them involves Charli reverse-alchemizing her global phenom status into producer, actor and co-writer credits on a micro-budgeted, willfully niche project like \u201cErupcja.\u201d It suggests a cinephile\u2019s seriousness about the shape and longevity of her movie career that would be promising even if she wasn\u2019t good in the film. Except she is: She plays Bethany as a charismatic but callously self-absorbed young woman who, unlike Charli, doesn\u2019t actually have much going on to be so absorbed by. To put it another way: Bethany\u2019s a brat without actually being brat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of Ohs\u2019 witty edits (the director is also the cutter, cinematographer, producer and co-writer, alongside the cast) reveals that the tectonic rumbling on the soundtrack is not magma boiling beneath the earth\u2019s crust, just the banal clatter of a cabin-sized suitcase being wheeled along a pavement. Bethany is trundling through Warsaw with her boyfriend Rob (Will Madden), looking for their Airbnb. Back in London, they\u2019ve been living together for a year \u2014 like much background detail, this is related to us in laconic Polish by a drily omniscient narrator (Jan Lubaczewski), which gives this \u201990s-style indie a little frisson of the French New Wave.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut it\u2019s clear from their body language and vocal inflections (his: enthusiastic, devoted, a bit clingy; hers: detached, rote, a little bored) that they may not be on the same page of their particular book of love. While Rob, who is plotting a marriage proposal, has a snooze, Bethany goes out to \u201cexplore.\u201d Actually, she walks purposefully to a flower shop owned by Nel (Lena G\u00f3ra), whom she met 16 years prior on a school trip, and several times since.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOn each occasion, the fireworks of at least a passionate friendship occurred through blurry nights of partying. (It\u2019s unclear, and not hugely important, whether Bethany and Nel\u2019s relationship is, or ever was, sexual.) And on each occasion, somewhere in the world, a volcano erupted \u2014 perhaps all the ejaculatory imagery renders an actual sex scene moot. Nel and Bethany joke about this cosmic coincidence, but it tacitly reinforces the specialness of their bond. Right on cue, there blows Mt. Etna. <\/p>\n

Bethany\u2019s flight home is canceled, so she and Rob have a few more days to spend in Warsaw \u2014 together, but increasingly separately. After a house party thrown by Claude (Jeremy O. Harris), a friendly expat American whom they meet by chance because no one has ever been on a Euro city break and not encountered a friendly expat American, Bethany leaves with Nel and stops answering Rob\u2019s calls. Nel ignores the concern of her sister (Maja Michnacka) and breaks a date with her ex (Agata Trzebuchowska) to hang with Bethany instead.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s really all that happens; the height of the action is Bethany sitting and drunkenly reciting Byron\u2019s \u201cDarkness\u201d \u2014 a poem chosen, one assumes, for its bombastic, vulcanized imagery but also for its author\u2019s reputation as an incorrigible narcissist. Because while \u201cErupcja\u201d is too modest to sell its revelations as earth-shattering, it does neatly upend our preconceptions about these vividly flawed characters. Initially we\u2019re cued to despise poor, cuckolded Rob, for demonstrating the commonplace male affliction of a total failure of imagination when it comes to his girlfriend\u2019s interior life. And we\u2019re cued to sympathize with Bethany\u2019s restless desire for something other than a dully domesticated future with a guy who pees sitting down and muses \u201cI should drink more water tomorrow\u201d after glancing into the toilet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in incremental, imperceptible shifts, we\u2019ve done a full 180 by the film\u2019s generous ending, which is kind to everyone who deserves it and tough on those who don\u2019t, while wisely nudging the rest of us away from the folly of pursuing some previous, nostalgized vacation-version of ourselves. That person belongs to a different time, to a different town and to people who cannot be expected to remain the same, any more than the slopes of a volcano can be expected to still be molten rock an eon after the last eruption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Only a species suffering from terminal main character syndrome would, when describing intimately human experiences like love, reach…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[50591,77,253642,3943,253643,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-900648","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-charli-xcx","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-erupcja","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-pete-ohs","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116420051431058185","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}