Singer Charli XCX is, by her own admission, a workaholic—as soon as she released Brat, the most dominant pop album and aesthetic of 2024, she began work on its sequel, which dropped just four months later. Insanely self-centered and image-centric, pop star Charlotte Aitchison is a keen student of pop culture; she understands the public’s demand for constant reinvention from pop stars. The next phase of her career, it seems, is acting, no less prodigious than music; the 33-year-old has seven films in the works as a supporting or leading actor.
Charli isn’t the full star or anchor of Erupcja (Eruption), directed by Pete OHS, but she’ll inevitably be the reason most English speakers listen to it. Filmed over a few weeks in Warsaw, Poland, in August 2024, in the heat of the summer, Erupcja seems, on paper, like a sensible step for a pop star making her first foray into filmmaking. OHS is an unconventional, independent filmmaker who has dabbled in different genres—supernatural horror, science fiction—and films chronologically, writing collaboratively as she goes. Charli has spent the better part of a decade on the edge of pop music and mainstream pop music. Small, contained, and relatively undemanding of her actors or her audience, she’s a safe bet.
Indeed, at a modest 71 minutes, Erupcja has the feel of a demo—loosely sketched, a bit of a potential proof-of-concept, and unpolished for what’s to come. With her distinctive frizzy hair and English accent, Charli barely disappears as Bethany, a Londoner visiting her devoted boyfriend Rob (Will Madden) who is very much in the bratosphere—cool, a bit crazy, largely expressionless behind sunglasses, focused on partying. The curious will have to wait: Charli reveals little in her portrayal, extending her pop persona or, in more demanding moments, operating with the excessive precision of a diligent student. OHS often films her from behind, shadowed by a staircase, out of focus, diverting or subverting the expected attention, depending on your opinion.
For a film called Eruption—so named because a volcano supposedly erupts whenever Bethany and her teenage friend Nel (Lena Góra, easily the best of the cast) reconnect; this time, it’s Mount Etna—there’s curiously little expression. The agony and ecstasy in Nel and Bethany’s past friendship are implied not by the actors, feeling their way through the remarkably if realistically logistically heavy dialogue, but by the narration provided by an omniscient adult male voice. Its irreverent details fall, like many song lyrics, in the murky area between profoundly simple and simple, really good and sounding good. (“Sometimes she listens to music,” he says of Nel in his favorite place to sit alone in the city. “Sometimes she doesn’t.”) Rob wants to propose to Bethany, who treats him coldly. The whole Erupcja, in fact, works—icy silences, restrained emotions, frequented glances. Even Warsaw, with its bright flakes of graffiti on drab concrete, feels cold, though the OHS frames it beautifully. (Zofia Chlebowska served as a Polish cultural consultant and translator.)
Unfortunately, the same happens with the central friendship, which supposedly triggers a mutual self-destructive sequence. (Producer Jeremy O’Harris also appears as Claude, a stereotypically insufferable expat artist whose house party milieu serves as Bethany’s getaway car.) A whirring, staccato montage of Bethany and Nel at a Warsaw club evokes the blurry thrills of a night out with an old friend, but leaves the evidence of their charged bond in tantalizing shards. We’re often told how they talk—about reality TV, about poetry, about themselves—but denied the pleasure of seeing it.
So we’re left with the character sketches—one lonely and recessive, the other very self-absorbed. The initially appealing casualness of OHS’s design quickly fades into a slightly irritating superficiality—lots of unconvincing glances and no-looks that don’t evoke images that don’t. I wish OHS or its actors, including Charli, tapped a bit more into a suggested undercurrent of intense, simmering emotion, especially for two friends with a supposedly combustible bond. But maybe next time; this was just practice.
