US indie director Pete Ohs is on a productive streak, with not one, but two, feature premieres this year. In March, he debuted The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, an unsettling micro-drama led by Alien: Covenant [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] star Callie Hernandez, at SXSW, and later presented a cinematic treat at Toronto, which has now screened in Thessaloniki’s Open Horizons sidebar. Erupcja was shot in Warsaw and largely in Polish, starring the country’s most impressive rising star, Lena Góra (Roving Woman [+lee también:
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entrevista: Olga Chajdas, Lena Góra
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Erupcja is a novella-film and wears its heart on its sleeve. A secret project shot during Charli’s tour at the height of the 2024 aesthetic staple BRAT Summer, and shaped by Ohs’s improvisational, free-flowing approach to filmmaking, his newest offering carries all of the hallmarks of an indie product. Lines that feel thrown out and uttered on the fly, sound design that’s unpolished and echoey at times, and inventive ways of shooting incognito in a busy urban setting all define Erupcja as a labour of love. This unencumbered spirit, however, has to overcome several obstacles – ie, some stifling structural decisions, such as the presence of an omniscient (male) narrator whose observations veer into the prosaic so often that they make him obsolete.

Despite a slim running time of only 71 minutes, Erupcja twirls around the topic at stake – marriage and settling down – using every possible detour to give us a glimpse into what makes Bethany and Nel so special, constantly alluding to a star-crossed lovers subplot but without so much as a shared touch on screen. Regretful glances and sentences cut in half seem reason enough for Bethany to disappear on her boyfriend, leaving Rob to roam around the streets of Warsaw by himself, sulking. In typical BRAT fashion, though, the film has little sympathy for him as a character and prefers to vest its hopes in the women on screen, including Ida [+lee también:
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entrevista: Pawel Pawlikowski
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The actors (Charli, Góra, Madden and Jeremy O Harris as a bohemian US transplant in Warsaw) are all credited as writers alongside Ohs, making Erupcja a collaborative dance of sorts, channelling the free spirit of an urban love story destined to crash and burn. However one feels about the amounts of restraint exhibited in order to keep the sapphic undertones in check, the film’s strongest asset is certainly its semi-ensemble cast – they come together and define one another, even if Góra seems miles ahead of them in her subdued but striking performance.

Ohs is on camera duty and in charge of editing, and he does an impressive job of sculpting a romantic chronotope out of a most probably rushed, chronological shooting process. In the wholesomely comedic timing of the cuts, be it between scenes or to solid, pastel-coloured frames, one can easily recognise the filmmaker’s skilled ability to mould banalities into a moment of sparkling magic.

Erupcja is a US-Polish co-production staged by Forever Holiday, bb² and Spartan Media Acquisitions. Magnify manages the film’s international sales.