ERUPCJA: From Warsaw With Love

Is Pete Ohs the only filmmaker working today who knows how to tell a great story in under 90 minutes? In a world where it increasingly feels like a rarity for a film to be under two and a half hours—just check out the lengths of the past year’s Best Picture nominees—it’s refreshing to come across one that doesn’t sag under the weight of its running time. But Ohs’s indie gems, such as the 72-minute supernatural horror-satire Jethica and the 74-minute sci-fi rom-com Love and Work, remind us that imaginative and engaging cinematic storytelling on a smaller scale is still alive and well if you know where to look. His latest, Erupcja, is a charming tale of messy people coming together and falling apart over a few days in Warsaw that clocks in at a mere 71 minutes but stays with you much longer.

Missed Connections

Bethany (Charli xcx) and her boyfriend, Rob (regular Ohs collaborator Will Madden), have traveled from London to Warsaw for a quick vacation after Bethany insisted that the city is, in fact, more romantic than Paris. That’s important to Rob, as he is secretly planning on proposing to Bethany while they are there. However, when a volcanic eruption grounds flights and strands the couple in Poland, all of Rob’s carefully constructed plans quickly fall to pieces.

source: 1-2 Special

See, Bethany has a friend in Warsaw named Nel (Lena Góra) whom she met on a school trip when she was sixteen. Every time they get together, a volcano erupts, which they take as a sign to blow up their everyday lives and embark on romantic, explosive adventures together. When Nel asks Bethany about Rob, Bethany acknowledges that he’s nice, but with him, there are no eruptions. So, she abandons him at a party thrown by an American expat artist, Claude (Jeremy O. Harris), and runs off with Nel for days and nights of drinking, dancing, and poetry recitation.

But the thing is, your life can’t be one eruption after another. It’s exhausting and destructive, not just for you but for everyone around you. (As someone in the film bluntly notes, “What’s the joke? Volcanoes kill people.”) And while Bethany has not come to terms with that yet, Nel—who recently reconnected with an old girlfriend whose photos still adorn her apartment—is starting to realize that if she throws everything away every time Bethany comes to town, she’ll never be able to build anything of substance in her life. The question is: would it be worth it?

source: 1-2 Special

Nel and Bethany Go Boating

While there is an undercurrent of passion in Nel and Bethany’s relationship, their time together in Erupcja is remarkably chaste; their connection is intimate without being physical. And while Nel seems to want their relationship to be something more serious than chance meetings every few years, Bethany seems to thrive off the randomness; she promised to stay in touch with Nel after her last visit to Warsaw, but she hasn’t reached out at all. It’s as though normalizing her relationship with Nel would remove exactly what Bethany finds so exciting about it: it’s an escape from the mundanity of real life, where she lives in a London flat with a man who is nice but boring. Yet Nel has a real life too, and cannot exist only when Bethany wants (and needs) her to; she’s a real person, not just a vehicle for someone to relive their younger, wilder days.

Ohs regularly collaborates with his lead actors on the scripts for his films; Erupcja is no different, with Charli xcx, Will Madden, Lena Góra, and Jeremy O. Harris all credited as co-writers. The result, a few painfully awkward and obvious lines of dialogue aside, feels remarkably real and leads to wonderfully natural performances from the ensemble cast. Charli xcx thrives playing against type and has great chemistry with Góra, who, of everyone on screen, feels like the one you’d most want to have as a friend. Madden adds layers of depth to a character that could have existed merely to be mocked—his scenes towards the end, when he connects with Nel, are some of the best in the film—while Harris observes all the shenanigans with a wry eye and helps the members of this messy sort-of love triangle at least try to figure themselves out. The film’s freewheeling story is held together by Jaciek Zubiel’s Polish narration, which shines enough light on these characters’ backstories and motivations to make you feel as though you know them, likely better than they know themselves.

source: 1-2 Special

In addition to co-writing and directing Erupcja, Ohs also shot, edited, and produced it, but the editing is what really stands out. Scenes end not by cutting to black, but by cutting to colors: a soothing lilac, a warm peach, a cool teal. The palette, a visual signifier of the splashes of vibrant color that Nel and Bethany bring to each other’s otherwise greyscale lives, adds an extra burst of visual loveliness to the film.

Conclusion:

Erupcja captures the fleeting magic of vacationing in a foreign land and wanting it to somehow last forever…even though if it did, it wouldn’t be very magical anymore.

Erupcja opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 17, 2026.