‘Erupcja’ and the Manic Pixie Nightmare

Pete Ohs’s dream-like non-romance ‘Erupcja’ doesn’t know what to do with its female protagonist

Erupcja (2025), 1–2 Special

This article will contain spoilers for Pete Ohs’s Erupcja. Read with caution!

In 2025, movies love their city set pieces, but they also love Charli XCX.

XCX is well on her way to becoming my most watched actor of the year, what with her showing up as Cooper Hoffman’s uninterested girlfriend in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, a half-accurate iteration of herself in her mock-biopic, The Moment (directed by Aidan Zamiri), and a woman fascinated by violent content online in Daniel Goldhaber’s *Faces of Death earlier this year. From the outside, Pete Ohs’s Erupcja* seemed like it might be her most interesting choice yet.

In the film, Bethany (XCX) is dreading an inevitable proposal from her boyfriend, Rob (Will Madden), after he takes her on a trip to Warsaw. Rob is nice, but there’s no spark between them, especially when compared to her old friend, Nel (Lena Góra), who quite literally makes the world shake; a volcano erupts each time they waltz back into each other’s lives.

In increasingly careless attempts to avoid Rob and his ring, Bethany finds herself drawn toward Nel, watching her from a distance as she tends to her flower shop or stands on her balcony, or running into her by chance at a party. For Bethany, Nel, and Erupcja, coincidence, whether it be as big and destructive as a volcano or as small as a restaurant reservation, is a sign of cosmic connection.

There is certainly much to be said about the micro-genre of film that follows a character as they spend a distinctly short yet transformative period of time wandering around a major city, especially in a society so simultaneously overstuffed and yet lonely. Following in the vein of Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 recently are films like Kogonada’s zi or Pauline Loquès’s Nino.

Time feels distinctly strange in each of these worlds; by following characters as they reckon with the onset of illness, the films carry both a sense of perpetuity, perhaps this day or this weekend or these hours and the protagonist’s aimless journey can go on forever and ever, and urgency, as defined by the strict deadline.

The catalyst in Erupcja is something potentially much more familiar to the everyday person: Bethany flees from commitment, a life of being trapped in the wrong decision, and she has the power to push that deadline away each time it approaches.

Erupcja (2026), 1–2 Special

My favorite part of a good city-walk film is that they tend to be very character-driven; the best way to connect to a character is through what they do, not what they say, so to watch them reckon with a huge change in their lives in a place they’ve grown so familiar with is a fascinating method of studying who they are.

Erupcja’s Bethany, however, feels eternally out of reach. Thanks to the film’s near-monotone, matter-of-fact narration and lack of a formal script, we know her on the most literal level, but there’s very little to be ascertained about her interior world.

She likes to party until she doesn’t; she likes to do drugs with the right people in the right places; she dreams she’s stuck on a speeding train; she likes 19th century art but doesn’t seem to have any interest in creating anything of her own (or commenting on any paintings beyond how unique they are); she recites Lord Byron poetry that she may or may not be self-aware about and ghosts her loved ones at the drop of a hat, no matter their connection: out of sight, out of mind.

I could go all day listing facts about her, but they all read as just that: a series of facts, rather than a full-fledged person.

Erupcja seems less interested in understanding Bethany than in castigating her. Instead of a manic pixie dream girl created for a man to fall in love with and then forever miss, she reads as a character created to be put down, whether for her carelessness toward others or her readily apparent selfishness: the belief that when the world explodes, it’s because of her. She takes everything that she holds and destroys it, and it’s only ever relegated to something that she’s always done. Other characters’ mistakes are swept under the rug for the sake of forcing blame fully onto her.

Take Rob, for instance, who is framed by the film as exclusively a nice guy and a good boyfriend, if a little boring. But while he may be nice, he’s also the guy who plans a surprise proposal for a woman who hates surprises; the guy who takes his partner to her favorite place in the world and seemingly organizes their whole itinerary without her input; or, perhaps, the guy who organizes a back-to-back itinerary for a woman who clearly prefers going with the flow.

While it may not make him evil, it does make him seem overzealous and misguided, if not self-centered in his own way, revealing at the very least a glaring communication gap in their relationship.

“Is it my fault?” Rob asks Nel toward the end of the film, after Bethany has abandoned him.

“No,” Nel tells him, “she’s always been like this.”

Even Nel is drawn to the fiery chaos of Bethany, all too willing to abandon her own job and loved ones just to spend some time with her, but the film also dismisses that choice; Nel is simply using coincidence to see a spark that isn’t there, of course, and if she just thinks about it, she can manually recreate the same thing with someone else. Bethany is thus nothing special, only a bad influence who found herself at the center of Nel’s affections.

Why can’t Bethany simultaneously be awful and special? Nel and Rob get to reflect on the experience of her and grow while Bethany remains stagnant, forever, still stuck on that speeding train, even if not in the way she originally thought. Sure, her destruction and poor communication is the focus of this story, but I would be remiss not to wonder why.

Erupcja (2026), 1–2 Special

It is that question, that wondering why, that makes Erupcja feel like it was conceptualized and guided by someone who has been hurt by a Bethany, rather than a Bethany herself. The story wraps up tidily so Rob and Nel can pat themselves on the back and feel comforted by the fact that they are good, and always were good; they just happened to lose themselves in this compelling woman who was bad, and always will be bad.

From a technical perspective, the film is well-edited with a faded but beautiful color palette and interesting use of impersonal cinematography, but due to Bethany’s lack of interiority, it feels like putting lipstick on a ghost.

For a film so caught up in the idea of spark, taking it so far as to literalize it with the volcanoes, there is no passion or chemistry in any of the relationships in either an emotional or literal sense. It is difficult to buy into a story about love and lust when there are no such feelings anywhere in the object-centered visuals, muted colors, or the screenplay’s detached narration; together, these factors make for a film absent of life.

Without them, and without life, deciphering Bethany’s motivations aside from a simple free-spiritedness is essentially a shot in the dark. A story about a woman bored by men and enlivened by another woman would typically seem to me like a story about lesbian desire, but given the flatness of feeling here, that doesn’t seem to fit. A Bethany uninterested in either, on the other hand, feels nomadic, searching for a different life: perhaps traveling, spending nights with strangers, taking odd jobs so she can exist wherever she pleases at any given moment.

But Erupcja is not interested in what drives Bethany, or what may make her happy. Her character exists as nothing more than a destructive force.

Bethany simply moves back in with her parents after all is said and done. We only see the back of her head as she gets on the train home, so one can assume she returns unmarred and unchanged, ready to start this cycle from the beginning again.

Maybe that is the point, but if so, it’s a boring one that only echoes the one-dimensional roles we’ve seen women play again and again.

All in all, Erupcja’s riff on the modern manic pixie dream girl and passionate love plays as lackluster at best and sanctimonious at worst.