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With a woman standing in a Warsaw flower shop, looking at someone she used to love, and saying almost nothing — and you feel everything. That is Erupcja, seventy-one minutes. Polish word for eruption and it will sit with you for days longer than films twice its length. That's the kind of movie quietly breaks you.
Set against the subdued, quietly restless backdrop of Warsaw, Erupcja follows Nel, a florist drifting through routine, and Bethany, a British visitor whose arrival disrupts everything. Nel is grounded, present, rooted in the city like the flowers she arranges every day. Bethany played by Charli XCX in a performance I genuinely did not expect to affect me — is the opposite. She is untethered, restless in the particular way of someone who knows exactly what's coming and has chosen not to look at it directly.
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Bethany arrives with her boyfriend Rob, who is planning a proposal but it quickly becomes clear that her intentions are elsewhere. Their trip is framed as romantic yet oddly hollow. Rob represents stability, predictability, a life mapped out in advance. Bethany, however, appears disconnected from that version of herself and Will Madden plays Rob with this earnest, painful obliviousness that I found genuinely heartbreaking. He has planned everything. The city, the itinerary, the ring probably and she is already somewhere else entirely, has been for a while, and he just hasn't seen it yet. I know that feeling from both sides and neither is comfortable.
Bethany arrives in Warsaw only to rekindle a relationship with her former flame, Nel. Bethany and Nel's reunion, in their mind, is a cosmic one — every time they see each other, a volcano somewhere in the world erupts and the movie plays this with a completely straight face, which I love. It doesn't wink at you, it doesn't explain or justify the mythology, it just presents it as fact — the way people in the grip of an overwhelming feeling will convince themselves the universe is participating. We've all done it, we've all looked for signs that the thing we desperately want to do is somehow cosmically endorsed.
Nel lives in Warsaw where she works at a flower shop. When her childhood friend Bethany comes to visit with a new boyfriend, a volcano erupts. Just like that, just like it always does and something in Nel's face — Lena Góra is extraordinary in this role, all restrained longing tells you she knew. She expected it, she has been half-waiting.
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Fearing the impending proposal and unsure how she'll even answer it, Bethany heads off, driven by an impulsive urge to stoke an old flame. She ditches Rob's carefully curated romantic itinerary and follows Nel instead — through Warsaw's grungy lofts, clubs, back alleys, art spaces. During lunch, Bethany becomes more interested in an American painter they come across, played by Jeremy O. Harris, and is blisteringly quick to accept a party invitation, where Nel coincidentally also joins as another acquaintance of his. That scene at the party is where the film gets genuinely strange and gorgeous — everyone orbiting each other in the particular way of people who know something important is happening and are choosing to circle it rather than name it.
The film's collaborativeness can be felt in the unvarnished approach to the contemplative dialogue, which includes a couple of recitations of Lord Byron's apocalyptic poem "Darkness" and honestly that choice wrecked me. Byron writing about the world going cold and dark, recited in a film about a woman standing at the edge of a decision that will either illuminate or extinguish something. It's not subtle but it's sincere, and sincerity earns a lot.
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The film's strength lies in its refusal to judge. It does not frame Bethany's actions as right or wrong — only as human. Rob is not a villain, Nel is not a temptress, Bethany is not reckless for its own sake. She is just a person who cannot make herself want something she doesn't want, no matter how reasonable and kind and planned that something is and the film holds that truth without punishing her for it.
In the end, Erupcja is less a story than a mood — fleeting, bruised, and quietly devastating. Charli XCX gives a performance that is both natural and quietly layered, embodying a character who is constantly slipping between identities. Lena Góra matches her with a grounded presence that prevents the film from floating away entirely. Together they create something that feels less like watching a movie and more like overhearing a conversation you were never meant to hear — intimate, unresolved, and completely alive.