The Year of Charli continues, uninterrupted. There’s seemingly a new movie featuring Charli XCX out in theaters every week this year, ranging from soundtrack work (Mother Mary, “Wuthering Heights”) to minor acting roles (Faces of Death, The Gallerist, I Want Your Sex) to a full-on feature length self-portrait (The Moment). During the recent Brat Summer hype cycle, the British pop singer proclaimed herself a cinephile, sharing her personal Letterboxd account for wide public scrutiny and flashing the names of buzzy auteurs (David Cronenberg, Ari Aster, Joachim Trier, etc.) at her Coachella audience in her trademark nightclub font. It wasn’t until this year’s Charli Movie deluge that the attention flowed the other direction, though. Cinephiles are now confronted with the pop star’s screen & soundtrack presence on a weekly basis, whether we’re actively seeking it or not. All of her various 2026 projects were planned & produced at different times, but they’ve collected at the dam of film distribution to release all at once in one mighty flood. So, if this Charli onslaught is going to continue (for as long as it takes for the new Gregg Araki & Cathy Yan movies to come out, anyway), it is comforting to know that there’s at least one title in that flood that’s both stylishly cool & dramatically compelling, suggesting that she has a longer movie career ahead of her once this wave of post-Brat cinephilia naturally crests.
Erupcja stars Charli XCX as a Londoner on holiday, dragging her milquetoast boyfriend (Will Madden) to Warsaw, Poland after suspecting that he was planning to propose to her in Paris, France. The reason she chose Warsaw in particular is because she has a semi-sordid history of partying there, thanks to a long term on-again-off-again toxic friendship with a local slacker (Lena Góra), who works the counter at an inherited flower shop. Ever since they were teens, the two directionless women have felt a thrillingly volatile connection with each other, seemingly confirmed by news reports of a major volcanic eruption coinciding with every time they meet. So, whenever Charli’s immature party girl pops back into Warsaw to check in on her favorite ambitionless florist, it’s because she’s feeling the urge to blow up her entire life again, leaving only ash & rubble behind. They drink, they dance, they ghost the baffled boyfriend until he gets the picture and abandons his proposal plans. Despite all of its allusions to grand-scale natural disasters, Erupcja is intimately tiny in scope, trailing behind a clique of unimpressive thirtysomethings as they party through a series of romantic meltdowns while playing tourist in Warsaw. The overall mood is ecstatic, though, evoking big feelings through small gestures. It’s also the first instance I’ve seen where Charli XCX shows genuine dramatic chops as an indie-scene movie starlet, rather than just using The Movies as a multimedia brand extender. Whenever she’s offscreen, the audience deeply misses her.
For all of my Charli XCX blabbering here, I was most interested in Erupcja due to the growing name recognition of writer-director Pete Ohs, whose career in low-budget indies has been a constant, pleasant hum in recent years. I was first impressed with Ohs’s editing work in the Gen-Z gun violence drama Beast Beast, and his name has continued to pop up in exciting works like the supernatural stalker thriller Jethica (as a writer-director) and the video game fantasy adventure OBEX (as co-writer, editor, and cinematographer). Ohs’s background in music video work shows in each of his projects’ ability to find high style in cheap scenery, in this case searching for glimpses of laidback urban cool on every Warsaw street corner. The narration echoes that Eastern European setting by mimicking the cadence of a vintage propaganda film, reporting on the thirtysomething hangabouts’ emotional states by dryly stating how they’re feeling and what they’re dreaming between their petty arguments. Ohs also directly illustrates his characters’ emotions in flashes of muted, chalky pastels that serve both as mood-ring insights and as easy scene transitions. Like his work in Beast Beast, there’s also some thoughtful acknowledgement of how much of these young people’s lives are anchored to their phone screens, often flashing back to memories of absentminded late-night scrolling as if it were just as dramatically significant as any offline, real-world event.
It speaks well to Charli’s interest in cinema as an artform that she’s been taking the time to collaborate with up-and-coming filmmakers like Pete Ohs & Daniel Goldhaber instead of leveraging her pop star notoriety to exclusively work with more established names like Gregg Araki & David Lowery. Despite the explosive energy suggested by its title, Erupcja will mostly register as a quiet rumbling on the cinematic Richter scale, while more aggressively advertised projects like “Wuthering Heights” & The Moment will guide most of the loudest Year of Charli discourse. There’s something quietly extraordinary about Erupcja, though, like watching a volcanic eruption through news reel footage on your smartphone. It’s such a small container for such a big personality, and that contrast makes her presence all the more compelling.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 