The singer Charli xcx is, by her own admission, a workaholic – no sooner had she released Brat, the most dominant pop album and aesthetic of 2024, than she began work on its sequel, dropped just four months later. Insouciant and party-centric as her image may be, the pop star born Charlotte Aitchison is a sharp student of pop culture; she knows the audience demand for pop stars’ constant reinvention. The next career phase, it seems, is acting, with no less prodigiousness than music; the 33-year-old has seven films in the pipeline as a supporting or lead actor.
Charli is neither the full star nor the anchor of Erupcja (Eruption), directed by Pete Ohs, but she will inevitably be the reason most English speakers hear of it. Filmed over a few weeks in Warsaw, Poland, in August 2024, in the heat of Brat summer, Erupcja seems, on paper, like a sensible step for a pop star making her first foray into movies. Ohs is an unconventional, independent film-maker, who has dabbled in different genres – supernatural horror, sci-fi – and films chronologically, writing collaboratively as he goes. Charli spent the better part of a decade bridging pop music’s underground and mainstream. Slight, contained, relatively undemanding of its actors or its audience, it’s a safe trial run.
Indeed, at a modest 71 minutes, Erupcja has the feel of a demo – loosely sketched, a little unpolished, potential proof of concept for what’s to come. With her distinctive frizzy hair and droll English accent, Charli hardly disappears into Bethany, a Londoner visiting with her devoted boyfriend Rob (Will Madden), and who is very much in the Bratosphere – cool, a little bitchy, largely inexpressive behind sunglasses, party-focused. The curious will have to wait: Charli reveals little playing her, either extending her pop persona or, in more demanding moments, operating with the over-precision of a diligent student. Ohs often films her from behind, shadowed by a stairwell, out of focus, either shirking or subverting the expected attention, depending on your view.
For a movie named Eruption – so called 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 Etna – there is curiously little expression to be found. The agony and ecstasy in Nel and Bethany’s past friendship is implied not by the actors, feeling their way through dialogue remarkably if realistically heavy on logistics, but narration provided by an omniscient, adult male voice. His irreverent details fall, like many song lyrics, into the murky area in between profoundly simple and just simple, actually good and sounding good. (“Sometimes she listens to music,” he says of Nel at her favorite place to sit alone in the city. “Sometimes she does not.”) Rob wants to propose to Bethany, who treats him coldly. All of Erupcja, in fact, runs cold – icy silences, restrained emotions, freighted looks. Even Warsaw, with its bright slashes of graffiti over drab concrete, feels chilly, though Ohs frames it beautifully. (Zofia Chlebowska served as a Polish cultural consultant and translator.)
Unfortunately, so does the central friendship, which supposedly provokes a mutual self-destructive streak. (Producer Jeremy O’Harris also pops in 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 are often told of how they talk – about reality shows, about poetry, about themselves – but denied the pleasure of seeing it.
We’re left, then, with the sketches of characters – one lonely and recessive, the other wildly self-centered. The initially alluring casualness of Ohs’s project fades quickly into a mildly irksome shallowness – lots of unearned and unconvincing staring, docile conversations, should-be evocative images that do not evoke. One wishes that Ohs or his actors, Charli included, tapped a little more into a suggested undercurrent of intense, simmering emotion, particularly for two friends with an allegedly combustible bond. But maybe that’s for next time; this was just practice.