Erupcja: Charli xcx brings natural charm to this whimsical but weightless Warsaw hangout movie

Picking a place, a small cast and a premise, Pete Ohs has spent the last few years cooking up small and sometimes delightful US semi-improv low-budget curiosities like the horror-comedy Jethica (2022) and the folk-horror The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick (2025). This newest outing, a breezy Warsaw-set ‘hang-out’ drama in which restless British tourist Bethany (Charli xcx) strands her dull boyfriend Rob by disappearing with her local girlfriend, represents an upgrade in production terms. Think of it as Premium-Class Mumblecore, with tempting extra features like ‘Foreign location; retro European art-cinema detailing; famous singer moonlighting as an actress’.

Mixing these elements with Ohs’s day-before collaborative scripting and swift guerrilla shooting creates a light, often charming tale. But lightness slides into weightlessness, the film seemingly as enchanted as Bethany and florist Nel are by their flimsy ‘volcano theory’. Every time they meet, a volcano erupts somewhere – Etna this time – providing a geological parallel for their intense feelings, and an excuse to ditch their partners for carefree clubbing and all-night Byron poetry recitation. Their deal has the wishfulness of a teenage fantasy (“The volcanoes told us we were special”) stretched into adulthood, a fairytale they have woven together – the mutual fascination in their early scenes has a distinct flavour of Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), though the narrative is determinedly naturalistic. Its string of bar hangouts and drunken skittering across the Karowa bridge is given emotional distance by the Jules et Jim (1962)-style narration (spoken in Polish by the unseen Jacek Zubiel), another nod to classic French cinema. Shot in her ‘Brat’ summer, but released shortly after her teasing mockumentary The Moment (2025), the film lets Charli xcx give a pleasingly natural portrayal of Bethany’s hedonism, offset by Madden’s low-key playing and a subtler Lena Góra as the unsure Nel.

There’s a neat point buried here about using travel (or a peripatetic lover) as an opportunity to reset your life. But Bethany’s bolting, which sets Will Madden’s Rob nervily searching the city for her (a call-back to Madden’s infatuated zombie-boyfriend in Jethica) feels petulant rather than loved-up. Despite Ohs’s many volcano add-ins (cutaways to red- or orange-tinted volcanic eruptions, a faintly rising rumble under hard conversations), the women seem only haltingly playful together, lacking a passionate connection. Perhaps Ohs finds the hot stuff too gauche to include in such an airy piece.

► Erupcja is in UK cinemas 5 June