Nel runs her father’s flower shop in Warsaw, quietly suspended between a comfortable life and her intermittent situationship with Ula. Bethany arrives from London with her boyfriend Rob — who has planned a Paris proposal trip that Bethany redirected to Warsaw without explaining why. Mount Etna erupts. Bethany slips away from a party, ghosts Rob and his carefully structured itinerary, and finds Nel. They have known each other since a school trip at 16. Every time they meet, a volcano erupts. Claude, an extrovert American painter they encounter at a sushi restaurant, offers the pseudo-spiritual explanation: “Without the forces of therapy or religion, volcanism would have to do.” Written in the semi-improvised fashion that defines Pete Ohs’s practice — all four main cast members credited as co-writers, shot chronologically from half an outline. TIFF Centrepiece world premiere September 4, 2025. SXSW Audience Award Festival Favorites nominee. Miami Film Festival Knight Marimbas Award nominee. US theatrical April 17, 2026. UK theatrical from June 5, 2026.

The film had its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival in the Centrepiece section on September 4, 2025 — one of TIFF’s most curated programming placements, reserved for films the festival considers significant cultural moments. Ohs shot guerrilla in Warsaw during the height of BRAT’s commercial success, with Charli XCX working without security, believing it would only bring unwanted attention to filming. The film accumulates its critical consensus from Charli’s natural screen presence, the Warsaw setting’s unexpected cinematic warmth, and the Góra-Charli chemistry — the latter described across every review as the film’s most irreplaceable single quality. Metascore 72 from 21 critics. SXSW Audience Award nominee.

  • IndieWire described it as “a 71-minute wisp of a film that moves and sounds like a cartoon wind curlicue” — shot with half an outline and scripted on the fly, its elevated mumblecore energy suits “the unformed and searching nature of a wherever you go, there you are story.”

  • Colour matches as scene transitions — squares cutting to blue suitcases, Bethany’s purple sweater — and step printing give the film enough distinctive visual style to sustain its breezy runtime.

  • The volcanic eruption as recurring structural device — not horror, not metaphor, but a “pseudo-spirituality” that replaces therapy or religion as a way of making sense of the world — is the film’s most formally original formal conceit.

  • Rendy Reviews: “Ohs shoots them with dizzying delight and youthful zest, capturing a relationship grown older but not necessarily forward, their bond still suspended in time as they met when they were 16.”

  • The Moveable Fest: “One can only hope that the true star turn of Charli XCX might lead a few of her followers on Letterboxd to seek out a few of the influences on Erupcja.”

  • In Review Online: “a brisk but brash mumblecore that sort of elevates the city of Warsaw to stardom.”

  • IndieWire — “Charli xcx, a sly and natural screen presence”; splits the difference between Sofia Coppola and Jacques Rivette; crystallizes the condition of cultural displacement to a tee.

  • Rendy Reviews — magnetic and very funny mumblecore postcard; breezy, vibrant, bolstered by Charli XCX and Lena Góra’s fiery chemistry; sharp improvisational humour.

  • The Moveable Fest — “the mischievous spirit remains in Charli’s performance and proves just as magnetic”; Ohs honours an aesthetic tradition with ingenuity from the film’s first frames.

  • Cinematic Sense — Charli “very natural with a hint of charisma”; more than watchable but also very slight; 72 minutes is welcomingly simple and breezy.

  • IMDb 6.5 from 179 viewers. Metascore 72.

  • SXSW Film Festival 2026: Audience Award Festival Favorites — nominee.

  • Miami Film Festival 2026: Knight Marimbas Award — nominee.

  • TIFF Centrepiece world premiere September 4, 2025. US theatrical April 17, 2026. UK theatrical June 5, 2026.

  • Pete Ohs — writer, director, producer, editor, cinematographer; Jethica (2022), The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick (SXSW 2025); moved to Warsaw in 2023 — brings his semi-improvised multi-hyphenate practice to his most culturally visible project, with the Charli XCX-era visibility amplifying a formal approach developed across six features.

  • Charli XCX (Bethany) — credited as co-writer; the relatively reserved Bethany couldn’t be further from the brash BRAT persona, but “the mischievous spirit remains in her performance and proves just as magnetic.”

  • Lena Góra (Nel) — Polish actress, the film’s structural anchor — gives Nel the rooted specificity that makes Bethany’s periodic disruptive arrivals legible and affecting.

  • Jeremy O. Harris (Claude) — playwright, Slave Play — plays “an extroverted American painter who meets Bethany and Rob by chance” and serves as Ohs’s directorial surrogate: “Being immersed in a culture so different from my own helps me turn my brain off so I can enter a dream state more naturally.”

  • Will Madden (Rob) — the puppy-dog boyfriend whose well-planned Paris proposal collapses into Warsaw ennui; Agata Trzebuchowska from Pawlikowski’s Ida appears as Ula, Nel’s returning old flame.

The TIFF Centrepiece placement and the Metascore 72 confirm the critical community’s recognition. The SXSW Audience Award nomination confirms the film’s wider festival audience discovery. In Review Online’s formulation is the most precise: “as a cultural document, Erupcja is invaluably noteworthy.”

Erupcja belongs to the American mumblecore-adjacent tradition — Richard Linklater’s wandering European city romances, Céline and Julie Go Boating’s female friendship intensity, Before Sunrise’s city-as-emotional-landscape — filtered through Ohs’s specific multi-hyphenate practice of semi-improvised guerrilla filmmaking. IndieWire’s formulation is the most precise: “splits the difference between Sofia Coppola and Jacques Rivette.” The specific formal contribution is Warsaw as the unexpected arthouse film city — its charcoal-coloured vibrancy elevated to a kind of stardom — and the volcano mythology as the film’s most formally inventive structural device.

  • All four main cast members credited as co-writers — the Ohs practice of building the film chronologically from half an outline gives the performances their most believable naturalistic register.

  • Warsaw as film location — Ohs moved there in 2023 and is “fascinated by the transformative power of being in a foreign space” — the city becomes a site of wanderlust for characters who feel stuck there or feel transformed by it.

  • The volcanic eruption as relationship mythology gives the sapphic friendship its most formally distinctive structural logic — not allegory but lore, the kind of explanation that replaces institutional meaning for the BRAT generation.

  • Cinematic Sense noted the Céline and Julie Go Boating and What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? formal lineage — the literary narrator, the handheld city-level camera, the colour transitions — as Ohs’s most specific visual influences.

  • Charli XCX’s BRAT commercial peak during filming gives the production its most culturally specific timing — Rendy Reviews noted that Ohs “had been on my radar” because “his name was inescapable during the 2025 indie film circuit, arriving at every festival with a different title.”

  • Jeremy O. Harris’s theatrical profile and his Slave Play Broadway cultural visibility give the film a specific arts community discovery signal beyond the Charli XCX fanbase.

  • 1-2 Special handles US distribution — the arthouse boutique whose releases are positioned specifically for the Letterboxd and indie cinema community that will be the film’s most active word-of-mouth circuit.

  • The sapphic arthouse cinema community is one of the most active and most specifically engaged discovery audiences in independent film — Erupcja’s TIFF Centrepiece placement and its volcano mythology give it a specific community entry point.

  • The BRAT cultural phenomenon — the album’s commercial and critical saturation in 2024 — gives the film a cultural context that the Charli fanbase will use as a discovery signal, with the most ardent Letterboxd portion of that fanbase already the film’s most reliable advocates.

  • In Review Online noted that “excepting the newly bicurious and the chronically polyamorous, most people will adore Erupcja for the wrong reasons” — the film’s most precise and most honest observation about the relationship between its cultural visibility and its actual formal register.

  • The film screened at Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBTQ+ Film Festival — giving it a specific queer film discovery circuit alongside its broader arthouse distribution.

  • The Letterboxd-Charli community is the film’s most motivated and most immediately active word-of-mouth circuit — viewers for whom the Charli-Nel chemistry is the primary discovery argument.

  • IndieWire’s hope that Charli’s followers will use Erupcja as a gateway to its formal influences — Rivette, Coppola, Koberidze — positions the film as one of indie cinema’s most commercially unusual discovery vehicles.

The core audience is 20–40 — Charli XCX’s Letterboxd-active fanbase who will find the film through her name, sapphic arthouse cinema audiences who respond to the TIFF Centrepiece placement as a quality signal, and the mumblecore indie cinema community who follow Ohs’s work across his prolific festival circuit presence. The film’s 71 minutes make it an ideal single-sitting discovery choice for all three communities.

The film’s most commercially unusual quality is that it earns the critical engagement of its Metascore 72 through formal ingenuity rather than star power — and that Charli’s natural screen presence serves the film rather than the film serving her profile.

Ohs delivers the most commercially visible version of his semi-improvised practice — the Charli XCX cultural context gives the film its widest possible discovery reach while the formal ingenuity (colour transitions, step printing, omniscient narration, volcanic lore) ensures the discovery audience finds something worth talking about. The Góra-Charli chemistry is the film’s foundation. Warsaw is its most surprising formal asset. The film’s “elevated mumblecore energy suits the unformed and searching nature” of its characters.

Works best for the Letterboxd-active indie cinema audience that treats TIFF Centrepiece as a quality signal, Charli XCX fans prepared to find their pop star subdued and natural in a way the BRAT persona never is, and sapphic arthouse audiences who respond to slow-burning female friendship with volcanic metaphors.

The volcano mythology is the film’s most precise thematic architecture. Bethany’s line — “with him, the earth doesn’t shake and volcanoes don’t erupt” — is the film’s most complete argument about why she keeps returning to Nel and why that return always ends the same way.

The film is not about BRAT. Bethany is nothing like Charli XCX’s public persona. And precisely because Ohs made a film that uses Charli’s cultural visibility without being about it, Erupcja is the most honest available cinematic encounter with what she is as a performer rather than as a cultural phenomenon.

Ula calls Nel self-centred when she misses their date for Bethany. Rob pieces together his self-worth in the dust after the ghosting. The film’s social observation — that the combustible chemistry the mythology romanticises is also genuinely destructive to the people left behind — is its most formally honest and most underremarked quality.

Charli’s Bethany — subdued, mischievous, the impulsive irresistible force rendered without the BRAT armour — is the performance that makes the film’s cultural visibility and its formal register coexist without contradiction. Góra’s Nel — rooted, warm, perpetually disrupted by Bethany’s arrivals — is the performance that makes Bethany’s disruptions feel like something real rather than a plot mechanism.

Erupcja will be remembered as the film that announced Charli XCX as a genuine screen presence independent of her pop star profile — and as the Ohs film that confirmed his semi-improvised multi-hyphenate practice can generate TIFF Centrepiece-level work with the right collaborators and the right city.

  • SXSW 2026 Audience Award Festival Favorites nominee. Miami Film Festival 2026 Knight Marimbas Award nominee.

  • TIFF Centrepiece world premiere September 4, 2025. US theatrical April 17, 2026. UK theatrical June 5, 2026. Metascore 72. IMDb 6.5 from 179 viewers.

The TIFF Centrepiece confirmed the institutional standing. The Charli XCX cultural visibility delivered the discovery audience. The Góra-Charli chemistry made them stay.

Erupcja proves that the most honest films about combustible chemistry are the ones that also show what the combustion costs the people who didn’t get to choose whether to stand nearby — and that Pete Ohs understood this well enough to make Bethany genuinely difficult rather than simply irresistible.

Insights: A 71-minute mumblecore postcard of formal ingenuity and genuine sapphic chemistry — the TIFF Centrepiece placement confirms the critical community’s recognition, the Charli XCX cultural visibility provides the discovery reach, and the Góra-Charli chemistry is the irreplaceable foundation that makes both function simultaneously. Industry Insight: Ohs’s semi-improvised multi-hyphenate practice — writer, director, producer, editor, cinematographer simultaneously — produces its most commercially visible result precisely because Charli XCX’s cultural context gives the guerrilla Warsaw production a discovery amplification that the formal approach alone could not generate; the combination of indie discipline and pop star visibility is the film’s most unusual and most commercially instructive production model. Audience Insight: The Letterboxd-Charli community is the film’s most motivated and most immediately active word-of-mouth circuit — viewers who arrive through her BRAT cultural association and find a film that uses her natural screen presence in ways the pop persona never reveals are the discovery advocates who will sustain the film’s arthouse circuit life. Social Insight: A film that gives the viewer Rob’s perspective as clearly as Bethany’s — his self-worth assembling itself in the dust of the ghosting, Ula calling Nel self-centred when she misses their date — is making the most formally honest available observation about sapphic combustibility: that the volcanic mythology that makes it feel inevitable also makes it genuinely destructive to everyone who isn’t Bethany. Cultural Insight: Erupcja positions Charli XCX as a natural screen actor whose first major role demonstrates formal range entirely independent of her pop persona — and positions Ohs as the American indie filmmaker most capable of using Warsaw as an arthouse discovery city in the Sofia Coppola-Jacques Rivette formal tradition.

The volcano mythology makes Bethany’s returns feel inevitable. Góra makes them feel real. Charli makes them feel magnetic. Ohs makes the Warsaw cobblestones feel like the most cinematic streets in Europe. At 71 minutes, Erupcja earns every second of the cultural conversation it generated — and confirms that the most interesting thing about Charli XCX’s transition into film is that she is entirely capable of disappearing into a character who is nothing like her.

  • Movie themes: Combustible chemistry and the cost it extracts from everyone nearby, the suspension of people in the emotional time of when they first met, pseudo-spirituality as a framework for the decisions you make but cannot rationally justify, and Warsaw as a city that transforms whoever arrives in it.

  • Movie director: Pete Ohs — writer, director, editor, cinematographer, producer; Jethica (2022), The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick; Warsaw resident since 2023 — applies his semi-improvised guerrilla practice to his most culturally visible project, honouring the Polish cinema post-New Wave aesthetic with a formally inventive visual language.

  • Top casting: Charli’s Bethany — sly, natural, subdued; the mischievous spirit minus the BRAT armour — is the cultural bridge between the film’s indie register and its pop star visibility. Góra’s Nel is the emotional truth the chemistry requires. Harris’s Claude is Ohs’s directorial surrogate. Madden’s Rob is the film’s most honest and most underremarked moral presence.

  • Awards and recognition: SXSW 2026 Audience Award Festival Favorites nominee. Miami Film Festival 2026 Knight Marimbas Award nominee. TIFF Centrepiece world premiere September 4, 2025. US theatrical April 17, 2026. UK theatrical June 5, 2026.

  • Why to watch: The TIFF Centrepiece mumblecore that announced Charli XCX as a natural screen actor and Warsaw as a cinematic city — 71 minutes of volcanic mythology, handheld Polish streets, colour-match transitions, and the most formally unexpected performance of 2025’s pop star cinema crossover season.

  • Key success factors: The Góra-Charli chemistry plus the TIFF Centrepiece institutional placement plus Charli XCX’s BRAT cultural visibility plus Ohs’s multi-hyphenate formal discipline plus the Warsaw guerrilla production’s authentic city texture plus the Letterboxd-sapphic community’s active advocacy culture.

  • Where to watch: US theatrical from April 17, 2026 via 1-2 Special. UK theatrical from June 5, 2026. Check JustWatch for full streaming availability.

The volcano erupts. Bethany arrives. Nel abandons everything again. Rob reassembles himself. Claude explains it with pseudo-spiritual lore. Ohs films all of it at street level in Warsaw with colour transitions and step printing and a narration that sounds like it was written in a dream. At 71 minutes, Erupcja is exactly as long as it needs to be — and exactly as good as its TIFF Centrepiece placement promised.



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