Charli XCX is a stratospheric pop star. Like Madonna before her, she would also like to be a movie star. And while we don’t see the creator of the cultural phenomenon known as “Brat” — so popular they named a whole summer after it! — taking on Evita Perón anytime soon, the singer-songwriter has worked overtime to book roles in a variety of projects. Charli has chops, especially when it comes to comedy (see: her 2024 SNL hosting gig), and a penchant for gravitating toward the odd, the offbeat, the outrageous-but-in-an-off-brand-way. You’d expect her to do something like The Moment, an A24-sponsored mockumentary that acted as both a celebration and a cheeky epitaph for what writer Jason Parham called the “neon punk spirit” of Brat. Gracing a new Faces of Death meta-reboot, showing up in the WTF historical fantasy 100 Nights of Hero, and signing on for a collaboration with Audition/Ichi the Killer auteur Takashi Miike? These choices were admittedly not on our XCX bingo card.
Given the inevitable slew of bigger Charli-related big-screen outings in our future, you wouldn’t expect a scrappy drama filmed on the sly in Poland to be the vehicle that wins over can-she-act-or-not swing voters. Burdened with a title that causes magazine editors to go, “How exactly is this pronounced?” and shot for roughly the price of a Brat tour ticket, Erupcja is the sort of hazy, restless travelogue you associate with a bygone era of indie filmmaking — there’s a distinctly early Nineties feel to its international hang-out vibe tinged with 21st century anxiety, like a Jarmusch movie on the verge of a panic attack.
But that mood turns out to be a surprisingly strong fit for the performer at the center of director Pete Ohs’ story of personal dilemmas and natural disasters. It’s not just that Charli mutes the brashness associated with stage persona, though her character still uses “party” primarily as a verb. The movie gives her space to breathe, to wander around a city perfect for both off-the-cuff filmmaking and playing out existential funks, and to be the sort of anonymous thirtysomething who might find herself in the middle of a self-generated shitshow. Charli’s celebrity is AWOL. You just see someone lost in their own bad decisions and worst instincts.
It’s not that Bethany (XCX) is a stranger in a strange land as she walks down Warsaw’s streets, her rolling luggage rumbling over the cobblestones. If anything, she considers the Polish metropolis a home away from home, having spent a number of years there in her late teens and twenties. The fact that Bethany suggested it for a trip with her boyfriend, Rob (Will Madden), instead of his choice of Paris is telling. He wanted to go to the “City of Love” with his sweetheart; you can tell there’s an agenda on his end even before we see the engagement ring he’s waiting to give her. She suggested Warsaw because she thinks it’s way more romantic.
And for Bethany, it is more romantic — because that’s where Nel (Lena Góra) lives. This resident of Poland’s capitol runs the family business, a cute little flower shop that the subtitles inform us is literally named Cute Little Flower Shop. The two of them met ages ago, when Bethany was on a school trip. Her flight home had been canceled because a volcano erupted in Iceland, however, and she was stranded in town for close to week. They hit it off, hung out, maybe became a fling of sorts. When Bethany then went back to Warsaw a second time, a different volcano happened to erupt. Even weirder: The trend continued every time they got together, and sure enough, Bethany and Rob have no sooner checked into their Airbnb then boom! Italy’s Mt. Etna suddenly becomes highly active.
Lena Góra and Charli XCX in ‘Erupcja.’
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The two women have long joked that they’re magically cause of these natural disasters. “What’s the joke?” asks an ex-pat artist, half-kidding and fully aghast. He’s played by playwright and Ohs’ longtime collaborator Jeremy O. Harris, and is one of several credited writers on the film, along with Charli, Góra, Madden, and the director, suggesting Erupcja is a communal, find-it-as-you-go-along endeavor. Eventually, after Bethany and Rob spot Nels at the artist’s house party — she’s already gone dancing and drugging with her old friend on the down-low — he’s abandoned and his would-be fiancé goes AWOL. “Volcanoes leave so much destruction,” Bethany says. “And they leave perfectly good boyfriends in the dust.”
Whether there is some sort of magical-realism romantic mojo behind these dormant fissures to consistently blow their tops or it’s all just one elaborate metaphor is never explained; even the gruff-voiced, omniscient narrator commenting on the proceedings in Polish isn’t entirely sure. The longer you watch these vignettes, occasionally broken up by Ohs dropping in solid-color shots that act as visual palette cleansers (though he never gets around to using this particular shade), the more you realize the causes of these convenient disasters is beside the point. It’s the effects that matter, or as Rob later puts it, the way that the eruptions translate as hall passes — a sort of get-out-of-jail-free cards regarding accountability for any and all actions. All this ambling towards a climax that, even as the film remains slightly open-ended, is simply suggesting that shit happens when you’re young, dumb, and content to let the emotions of others become collateral damage to your whims.
But back to Charli. Her presence off-set may have been occasionally disruptive to this guerilla filmmaking affair — they shot this in 2024, right as Brat summer was hitting its zenith — but other than a few scenes of after-hours clubbing, there’s virtually no sense of the celebrity surrounding the “360” singer present onscreen. Which doesn’t mean XCX doesn’t have screen presence, obviously. She’s simply locked in to playing Bethany as another confused millennial trying to figure it all out and failing to stay away from moth-to-flame temptations. Relieved of the burden of making a “Charli XCX movie,” she shows a range here that hints at a versatility — a subtly that still makes the camera love her — than you might expect.
Still, Erupcja knows what’s it’s working with, and how to tap into something bigger than itself. At one point, Bethany finds herself sitting in Nels’ apartment, avoiding the damage left in her wake, when she begins reciting Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness.” (“Happy were those who dwelt within the eye/Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch.”) The camera simply frames Charli’s face in semi-closeup, as she gives a dramatic interpretation of an apocalyptic tale of passion and ruin. It’s a hundred times more compelling than virtually anything in The Moment, and a testament to star power even when it’s embedded into an anti-star-power performance. The scene is almost a throwaway in terms of the narrative. The result, however, is so Julia.