Joel on Film

There is a lot about coincidence and fate and the commingling of the two in Erupcja, but the specific way in which co-writer/director Pete Ohs’s film explores those themes is through the volcanic activity and, well, eruptions of Mount Etna, the stratovolcano located on the east coast of Sicily. Two of the main characters here are young women with a deep past, not recently explored due to unspoken events that led to one of them leaving and never remaining in touch with the other. A longstanding joke between them is that they caused several volcanos to erupt upon the very occasion of their reunion.

That’s also a pretty loaded joke, as another character her points out that, historically, volcanos haven’t been good news for the people who surround them. Deaths occur, as we know, but so does unthinkable devastation to the surrounding ecology and to anything manmade. By the end of this brief but appreciably introspective movie, yet another character will put that joke, as well as the implications driving it, in another context—one that really sums up the point Ohs is getting at in his movie.

In a way, it’s quite impressive how much the filmmaker has to say and how complexly he is able to articulate what is said, considering this is quite a brief movie, indeed—just barely more than an hour, not including credits. The key is the precision of the storytelling here, which chronicles just a few days in the lives of its characters, as each of them wanders through Warsaw, Poland, and into and out of each other’s orbit. Even if the film’s brevity means that its intended themes are mostly on the surface, credit Ohs and the unexpectedly rich ensemble for the credibility on display here.

Bethany (Charli XCX) and Rob (Will Madden) are an English couple traveling to Warsaw as a redirect from his plan to propose to her in Paris, following a few years’ relationship and a year of living together. Something is clearly occupying Bethany’s thoughts, though, and it’s not only—as we learn later—that she had seen the ring a month ago and anticipated the imminent proposal upon any potential trips he planned for them. This is clearly a couple who love each other, but the hesitancy in Bethany’s voice and the faltering eye contact—missed entirely by the smitten Rob—tells us everything we need to know.

Nelka (Lena Góra), who goes by “Nel,” owns and operates a flower shop in town—amusingly named “Cute Little Flower Shop” in her native Polish—which does solid business. Nel is preoccupied herself by the recent eruption of Etna, which has sent volcanic ash a considerable length and shut down most air travel in this general area of southern and eastern Europe. It’s not so much the potential casualties or any of the obvious concerns, though: Nel and Bethany are the two women in question who always seem to meet by accident, timed perfectly to an eruption.

Is it simply something within the mysterious and knotty connection between these two women, who treat the coincidence or destined reunion as a reason to drop everything and spend time (or a bed) together with no regard for others? That is certainly their running theory, but some other ones eventually raise their heads, too, presented by some other, surprising characters, whom this movie smartly never shortchange. One of those is Rob, whom the film initially relegates to the role of the harried boyfriend wondering about the sudden shift in his girlfriend’s attitude.

The screenplay, by the way, is credited as having been co-written by Ohs and the three actors already mentioned, in addition to Jeremy O. Harris (who also plays Claude, an American artist and traveler to Warsaw, where his work is being displayed). The type of collaboration here suggests, perhaps, a heavily workshopped and maybe even partly improvised exercise in developing characters on the fly. That means Rob is every bit as thoughtfully written as the two women caught in an entanglement, and one of the nicest surprises of the climax here is that it affords him the grace to be intelligent and fair about the whole thing.

As for Nel, played by Góra with canny emotional precision, she’s got her own entire story here, having enjoyed an on-and-off relationship with Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska, cutting in her brevity and leaving a bruising impression with little screen time) that might be threatened by Bethany’s arrival in town. In a movie that so impressively never allows a thread to go untidied by the end, this one haunts the rest of Erupcja, which might be too short for its own good but compensates for that with its disarming honesty.

Rating: *** (out of ****)