Erupcja review – Charli xcx gives acting a trial run in shallow friendship drama

Toronto film festival: the star fails to make much of an impression in a slight and unpolished project filmed in Warsaw over the Brat summer of 2024

The singer Charli xcx is, by her own admission, a workaholic – no sooner had she released Brat, the most dominant pop album and aesthetic of 2024, than she began work on its sequel, dropped just four months later. Insouciant and party-centric as her image may be, the pop star born Charlotte Aitchison is a sharp student of pop culture; she knows the audience demand for pop stars’ constant reinvention. The next career phase, it seems, is acting, with no less prodigiousness than music; the 33-year-old has seven films in the pipeline as a supporting or lead actor.

Charli is neither the full star nor the anchor of Erupcja (Eruption), directed by Pete Ohs, but she will inevitably be the reason most English speakers hear of it. Filmed over a few weeks in Warsaw, Poland, in August 2024, in the heat of Brat summer, Erupcja seems, on paper, like a sensible step for a pop star making her first foray into movies. Ohs is an unconventional, independent film-maker, who has dabbled in different genres – supernatural horror, sci-fi – and films chronologically, writing collaboratively as he goes. Charli spent the better part of a decade bridging pop music’s underground and mainstream. Slight, contained, relatively undemanding of its actors or its audience, it’s a safe trial run.

Erupcja is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date

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