I’ve spent two days trying to figure out why Erupcja bothered me more than it should have. It’s not a good film, but bad films don’t usually linger. This one does not because it haunts you but because it keeps raising its hand like it has something to say and then, when called upon, just stands there.
Charli XCX plays Bethany, English, art history background, Warsaw for the weekend with a boyfriend named Rob who is so aggressively inoffensive that I struggled to remember him scene to scene. The film wants us to feel that Bethany’s real pull is elsewhere toward Nel, a local florist she’s apparently been crossing paths with for years, and whose gravitational effect on Bethany is, we’re told, literally seismic.
Their encounters trigger volcanoes. Sure. I can work with that. The problem is that every time these two women share a scene, I felt nothing. Not tension, not longing, not even the faint warmth of two people who enjoy each other’s company. The script keeps insisting on the enormity of what’s between them, and the screen keeps failing to produce it.
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I don’t think it’s Charli. Or rather I think there’s something specific happening to her here, the same thing that happened to David Bowie in most of his films: a quality that’s undeniable in one context becomes completely invisible in another. Whatever she is on a stage or in a music video, whatever it is that makes her compelling, the camera in this film can’t find it. Director Marta Ohs apparently started shooting with half a script, planning to discover the rest. \
You can feel every missing page. The dialogue doesn’t just expose itself as exposition it seems embarrassed about it, trying to slip past you quickly. The voiceover, dry and Andersonian, works overtime to paper over the gaps where character development should be. I noticed the voiceover most in the scenes where I was bored, which is probably not what was intended.
The color washes sherbet blocks flooding the frame, lava cutaways, blue before the ocean comes aren’t without their charm in isolation. But charm in isolation isn’t a film. At some point you need the images to mean something beyond themselves, and Ohs never quite gets there.
Sacrifice I liked more, then less, then less again, and I’m still sorting out whether my final position is fair.
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Romain Gavras shoots the thing inside a Greek quarry of such severe, improbable geometry that you half-expect the setting to be explained but it never is, and somehow that’s right. This is a world where billionaires throw climate galas in places that look like the cover of a concept album, and nobody remarks on it, because of course they don’t. Salma Hayek Pinault hosts.
Vincent Cassel plays her husband bald, French, absurdly attractive in a way that seems to personally offend the film’s satirical premise. Chris Evans is the one I didn’t expect to find this interesting: Mike Tyler, a Golden Globe loser (the film’s phrase, worn by him like a scarlet letter), prowling the edges of the party, burning with the specific desperation of a man who knows he’s being phased out of rooms he used to own.
Then the eco-terrorists arrive. Anya Taylor-Joy leads them with the kind of commitment that makes you feel slightly embarrassed for the script around her. She’s backed by Yung Lean, who is exactly as disconcerting as you’d want, and a third figure so deliberately strange small, pale, rabbit-eared in some ineffable way, like something that got lost in the canal system of Don’t Look Now and never quite found its way back that I wrote her name down to look up later. They want three rich people for the volcano. The film, at this point, is genuinely alive.
Will Arbery co-wrote it and his Succession fingerprints are on the best lines a “make earth great again” joke, a running gag about Mike’s hair anxiety, the kind of precision mockery of the liberal-elite guilt complex that lands because it doesn’t explain itself. Gavras, whose whole career has been about making images feel like events, delivers sequences that actually do. For an hour I thought I was watching something that might hold together.
It doesn’t. The dream sequence is where it starts to go, and once it goes, it doesn’t come back. There’s a sermon in the third act about faith and authenticity that the film hasn’t earned and can’t quite deliver and the uncomfortable thing is that The Menu already covered this ground, and Opus already re-covered that, and at some point the diminishing returns become the point you’re making whether you mean to or not.
Gavras is better than this ending. The tragedy of Sacrifice is that he filmed two-thirds of something with actual nerve, then lost his footing somewhere in the descent and just kept walking.
Erupcja Parents Guide
Not rated by the MPA.
Violence & Intensity: The film’s most intense imagery is geological lava footage, eruption cutaways, the occasional color wash standing in for emotional upheaval. It’s more art installation than thriller. Parents worried about their kids being disturbed by Erupcja are solving a problem the film doesn’t create.
Language: No notable profanity, no slurs. The tone throughout is polite, almost excessively so which is partly an aesthetic choice and partly just a script that doesn’t know how to make its characters sound like real people.
Sexual Content & Nudity: The film’s central relationship is between two women, and while the script insists their connection is overwhelming, volcanic, life-altering the actual on-screen content between them is remarkably chaste. No nudity. No explicit scenes. Whatever heat the film was reaching for, it never arrives, which is the whole problem with Erupcja as a film and, incidentally, not much of a concern for parents.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Social drinking consistent with a European weekend-away setting. Nothing that registers as a focal point.
Age Recommendation: Fifteen and up feels right not because the content demands it, but because younger viewers will simply have no patience for it. This is a slow, quiet film about adult longing that doesn’t fully understand itself. The irony is that the audience most likely to sit through Erupcja willingly is also the audience least in need of a parents guide.
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