"Erupcja" as a coming of age film

Myth and ritual performed by Charli XCX and Lena Góra

I saw Erupcja in the iconic Kino Pod Baranami in Krakow. The theatre itself opened in 1969, but this screening was in the Niebieski Sala, which felt far too vintage and communist-era to have been built in just 2003. The vibe was perfectly funky; this is exactly how Charli would want it, I thought as I settled in for the 90 minutes.

Having spent the last eight months in Poland, and being in active preparation for my second brat summer, I was obviously going to be at the first screening of Erupcja I could find. Unfairly, I went in with low expectations. I was unfamiliar with the work of Pete Ohs and unsure if this would be an independent film that relied on securing big names like Charli XCX and Jeremy O’Harris to compensate for a half-baked movie. I was wrong. I can’t stop thinking about it.

I was ready to eat up the latest “sapphic love story” I had seen buzz about online, only I don’t think Erupcja is that. In fact, I didn’t feel the central relationship was necessarily romantic, or certainly not in any clear way. But I don’t think it made a difference here. Warsaw is the romance in Erupcja, and for all intents and purposes, the story is about coming of age.

Stick with me. (Spoilers ahead)

Bethany is a thirty-two-year-old Brit with an appropriate love of Warsaw, and some maladaptive tendencies (no judgment here). She is travelling with Rob, her earnest boyfriend with whom she has lived for the past year, and she’s unenthusiastically aware of his plan to propose. Charli XCX and Will Madden play their roles too well. Bethany’s indifference towards her boyfriend and his timidity to address it make for a properly painful watch. They act out the kind of unspoken resentment that can only be observed on bad first dates or among long-term couples whom everyone else can identify as being near the end. You get the sense early on that she is utterly unhappy, and he is desperately in denial.

And then you have Nel, played by the captivating Lena Góra. Nel and Bethany have sixteen years of tumultuous history under their belts, which Charli XCX and Lena Góra masterfully perform, striking a balance between chemistry and hesitation.

The titular premise, spelled out for viewers again and again, is that every time Bethany is in Warsaw and reunites with Nel, a volcano erupts, literally and as an obvious metaphor for their relationship. The girls first met when Bethany was 16 on a school trip to Poland, and a nearby volcanic eruption forced her to stay in Warsaw for a month. The two formed a fiery connection during this time, in a serendipitous beginning to their friendship.

Four additional visits to Warsaw coincided with volcanic eruptions, prompting the girls to develop the partial joke and partial theory that their reunion was and would always be the cause of an eruption. Embodying this explosiveness, Nel and Bethany’s reunions became sprees of debauchery and self-destruction, often involving cheating on partners and getting fired from jobs. Their connection is addictive, and their reunion is a relapse: Bethany secretly stalks Nel in the streets. All plans and obligations fall away in the presence of the other. Even Nel’s sister checks in on her, throwing concerned and disapproving glances at Bethany as if to say to her sister, you’re really back on that shit? Not only does the “fuck everything that’s not us” vibe read as a high, but there’s something juvenile about it, as if every reunion brings Bethany and Nel right back to age sixteen.

I’ve been fascinated as of late by the anthropological schools of thought surrounding myth and ritual. Myths are narratives which, irregardless of truth, contribute to the formation of values and identity in a society, culture, religion, cult, or other group. What I find particularly interesting is the debate among scholars about whether rituals form from mythology, or whether myth itself is created to justify ritual.

Eruption feels like a mythology shared between Bethany and Nel. It’s their personal folklore. And if their mythology is one of fiery explosions every time they meet, their ritual is to surrender to that energy, moving like lava and engulfing everything in their path. Unfortunately, this also means leaving the land scorched under them.

Nel and Bethany desperately need these ritual reunions to shake up their stagnant lives and make the hard changes they know they should. These maladaptive trysts, returns to an unencumbered teenage recklessness, can only be justified with a really great story about volcanic eruptions and supernatural coincidences. They want the myth to justify the ritual, but we know, and they know, it’s the other way around. As Claude, played by Jeremy O’Harris, puts it, this is the kind of story kids come up with to make sense of the world; only Bethany and Nel carried it into adulthood.

Why?

Because it’s easier for them to lean on this narrative formed in youth than to take a cold, hard look at their adult lives and own up.

It’s less painful for Bethany to ghost her serious boyfriend in a foreign city and convince herself that the forces of nature willed it than to face the discomfort of hurting him. It’s easier to speak in euphemisms than to admit plainly that she doesn’t love the man she spent the last years of her life with.

With him, the Earth doesn’t shake, she shares.

As Nel explained to a dejected Rob, each time a volcano erupts while Nel and Bethany are together, it reinforces the narrative, and they take it as a personal message: You are special. Who doesn’t want to feel special? But as Rob points out in return, sometimes feeling special turns into feeling above accountability.

This is where Erupcja becomes a coming-of-age film, but not for Bethany. In fact, Charli XCX disappears for a good portion of the movie, leaving us as she leaves Rob, so we see the human cost of her choices, while Bethany never has to.

Nel wants something different.

In what I believe was her final rendezvous with Bethany, Nel forgot she had made plans and ultimately stood up Ula, her on-and-off lover, whom she genuinely seems to have feelings for. The two of them were already on shaky grounds for reasons we don’t know, but Ula provides a clue when she confronts Nel, positing that Nel makes everything about herself.

This is where we see the myth fall apart: Bethany wants to live in it, holding onto her childish tendencies and attempting to circumvent the hard part of ending a relationship. She disappears around Poland for the week, goes home alone, and moves in with her parents. We only learn this from the narrator, with virtually no insight into her personal transformation, atonement, or lack thereof.

Nel wants better for herself. She has the hard conversations. She knows intuitively that she and Bethany’s eruptions are not fated, but chosen every time. She stops avoiding her feelings for Ula and runs toward the uncertainty instead. Importantly, she begins to atone, spending the day beside Rob while he undergoes his own revelation and apologizing to Ula in a way that feels sincere and tough.

The single moment that really gets to the heart of the movie is when Rob shares his findings about volcanoes with Nel: there are over a thousand active volcanoes on Earth. Eruptions happen almost weekly.

Really? She asks sincerely. Ok.

Erupcja is about the stories we tell ourselves, and the realities we think they protect us from. In a way that feels prickly and intrusive when turned on our own lives, Erupcja asks us to examine the rituals we don’t want to let go of, and the myths we construct to legitimize them. Sometimes the coming of age happens at thirty instead of thirteen, when we choose to shed our adolescent understanding of the world and take ownership of our lives and decisions. And that can be earth-shaking in and of itself.

*Note: I watched the movie just once in the theatre, and I wasn’t planning on writing a review, so any paraphrasing is from memory. I’m sorry it’s not exact, but I hope I captured the essence.

Read more of Ken's work here.