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Every time Rob mentions Warsaw, he says, “Warsaw, Poland,” just like that, both city and country, as if he’s willing himself to be there, perhaps, but also determined to embrace it since it means so much to Bethany. It’s evocative of his unwitting sweet nature, even if that sweet nature proves no match for what his girlfriend feels with Nel. “The earth doesn’t shake,” Bethany explains of her relationship with Rob. “Volcanos don’t erupt.” These are sensations that Ohs brings to life on the soundtrack through rattling glasses and tableware, even luggage on the cobblestone streets, making it seem as if distant volcanic tremors are sending a warning on a frequency that not everyone can hear. Indeed, at breakfast, Rob gets a notification on his phone of a cancelled flight home: Italy’s Mount Etna has erupted. That’s the sign: Bethany essentially ghosts her would-be fiancé just as Nel inadvertently ghosts her ex-girlfriend Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska) just back in town. It’s not so much that the rest of the world can wait as it ceases to exist.
Among the most intriguing elements of “Erupcja” is that Bethany and Nel’s relationship is presented as platonic yet conveyed with the same sort of headlong rush typically associated with a physical relationship, suggesting that romantic soulmates exist in all manner of shapes and sizes. Ohs brings that connection to life less through traditional scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends than through aesthetic jolts of montage and music – eruptions, if you will. Such an approach is unsuitable to filling out backstory and so Ohs leaves the exposition to novel-like narration by Jacek Zubiel that in his wry tone suggests a kind of cheeky cultural anthropologist. Nel works at a flower shop, and through this narration we learn that she and Bethany met when the latter was buying flowers for herself, an action that can appear as self-care through one lens and narcissism through another.
Indeed, if there is self-evident selfishness to Bethany and Nel’s way of life, that is not glossed over but made clear. Nel’s American expat artist friend (Jeremy O. Harris) goes so far as to point out that, like, you know, “Volcanos kill people.” To Bethany and Nel, though, this concrete fact seems to go in one ear and out the other, making me think of the recent SNL sketch where in playing one real-life media influencer feuding with another real-life media influencer, Chloe Fineman described her character’s dispute as “worse than 9/11.” Another movie might also have written off Rob as collateral damage, but the denouement of “Erupcja” cedes the stage to him, imbuing a genuine sense of his confusion and dismay, as if Bridget Monyahan’s character had been given a say in “Serendipity.” And as the narrative gets handed off to him, Bethany recedes from view, her quasi-resolution mentioned in passing by the narrator as an afterthought. Before that happens, though, she delivers a monologue straight to the camera by reciting Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, which comes across like the most XCX touch of all. This poetry recitation is what passes for an explanation, like a celebrity apologizing via Instagram without apologizing for anything in particular.
