Erupcja Review

Rob (Will Madden) takes his girlfriend Bethany (Charli xcx) on a romantic trip to Warsaw, intending to propose. Bethany senses his intention, and is not keen. Avoiding him as much as possible, she uses the trip to reconnect with her old friend Nel (Lena Góra), who is having her own romantic troubles. The two spend time together drinking and quoting poetry, attempting to outrun their problems. But when an erupting volcano grounds all flights for a few days, trapping her and Rob in Poland, Bethany is forced to confront her feelings about their relationship head on.

Erupcja is the Polish word for eruption, and writer-director Peter Ohs gives that a canny double meaning here. There’s the obvious one, in that every time Bethany and Nel have reunited over the course of their friendship, there has been a notable volcano eruption. And there’s the subtextual one, in how the feelings (or rather, lack thereof) that Bethany has for Rob are forced up to the surface, exploding in all their messiness.

This sense of tension simmering to a boil gives Erupcja a nice sense of forward momentum, which is aided by the fact that it is only 71 minutes long, shot on a handheld camera, and separates its scenes with bursts of block colour that fill up the entire screen. The main cast members have co-screenwriting credits, as the dialogue was workshopped together before shooting started each day. Buoyed by that collaborative, creative spirit, this is a movie that erupts out of the screen, but instead of deadly lava, it spews colour and energy.

It is a vibrant film, almost veering towards the brash, and Erupcja uses that kaleidoscopic style intelligently, to underline and interrogate its core themes. We can see straight away that Bethany and Rob are not right together; their scenes are itchy, uncomfortable, beige. She looks like she can barely stand to be in the same room as him (despite being so new to acting, Charli xcx is excellent at expressing devastatingly polite disdain). With Nel, however: fireworks. Though their relationship isn’t depicted as romantic, they have oceans more chemistry than Bethany does with the man she seems to be on the verge of marrying.

It’s easy to imagine a version of this film that vilifies Rob for being blind to the feelings of the woman he claims to love, or just, well, boring. To its infinite credit, Erupcja doesn’t do that. Instead, once all the truth has burst to the surface, the characters are forced to sit with both themselves and each other, and face the fact that across the world, a volcano erupts roughly once a week. Things that feel special and exciting can still be quotidian.

Not that that means the movie is eager to marry Bethany off to a man she clearly isn’t in love with either. Instead, Erupcja finds a warm-hearted middle ground, treating all three of its leads with generosity as it sends them off to their respective futures, a little wiser and a lot happier.

★★★★