TIFF 2025 / Volcanic deflations
On Charli XCX, Erupcja, and Sacrifice
To understand the appeal of Charli XCX, one must not watch her acting debut in Erupcja, which strips her of whatever magnetism she typically possesses and disappears her into utter normalcy. The nearest comparison is David Bowie, whose extraordinary aura was usually diminished on film—save for the few odd roles that could actually hold his alien quality.
This is what I suspect is happening here with Charli. It is possible, of course, that she simply can’t act, but I’ll withhold judgment since any current assessment is undermined by the undercooked script and piecey camera work, which almost seems allergic to holding onto a reaction shot. Even the professional actors appear stunted, unable to inhabit skeletal frameworks called characters.
Charli plays an English woman named Bethany, who studied 19th century art history, a superficial detail included mostly as pretext to visit a museum in Warsaw, where she and her boyfriend Rob have come for the weekend. Their relationship is well-mannered, entirely decorous—the kind of restrained comportment one might expect from British characters—and utterly devoid of romance. The stale air is quickly explained: while a jet-lagged Rob naps, Bethany seeks out Nel (Lena Góra), a local florist with whom she supposedly shares a connection so potent that their half-dozen encounters over the years have triggered volcanic activity. Over the following days, as Bethany abandons Rob (and his impending proposal) in favor of rekindling the ineffable spark with Nel, the film whimsically intersperses images of lava destruction or turns into a block of color—sherbet tones, red when someone is angry, blue before the sea—that operate as a kind of pillow shot.
While Warsaw is considered by the characters as more romantic than Paris, Bethany and Nel’s companionship never feels earth-shattering or faintly erotic and never approaches any semblance of intimacy. As I struggled for words, weighed down by festival fatigue, the reason eventually became obvious: there is almost nothing there to describe. Characters are hollow, undefined, even at the surface level—what do Rob and Bethany do?
Dialogue is clumsy, exposition flaunts itself, and a dry Andersonian voiceover functions as a necessary buttress against the dead air. Ohs’s vaunted creative process (beginning with a half-script and “discovering” the rest along the way) registers not as daring but as negligence, turning Erupcja into an unintentional masterclass in telling rather than showing— a breathtakingly confident exercise in cinematic mediocrity.
Romain Gavras’s Sacrifice similarly concerns volcano metaphors, vacuous characters, and, very briefly, Charli XCX, who turns up at climate-change gala in a Greek quarry to sing and gyrate before for A list celebrities. Chris Evans, doing surprisingly sharp work, plays a washed-up “Golden Globe loser” Mike Tyler, grasping for relevance at a climate change charity gala, set in an exquisite geometry of a Grecian mine, and hosted by a pop star (Salma Hayek Pinault) and her billionaire husband (Vincent Cassel, bald and French and improbably more attractive than Bezos ever managed).
The early stretch crackles with barbed jokes and surreal collisions of pop-kitsch and eco-doom, as a group of eco-terrorists—or, as Cassel’s character sneers, “queer pagans”—hijack the glitzy soiree, demanding three rich persons to appease into the volcano. Anya Taylor-Joy plays their leader, backed up by Yung Lean and another small girl, Jade Croot who looks like she came out of the canals of Don’t Look Now wearing rabbit years, such is the manufactured absurdity of Gavras, who with his music-video pedigree, knows how to whip different elements and sensibilities into a fluid, slick spectacle—big sound, big images, the black-tie glamor; the cult members edgy new microbangs and Dragonballz headbands.
Meanwhile, the script’s co-writer Will Arbery (Succession), is a mostly clever satirist who clearly knows how to prick at neoliberal absurdities, giving us a string of jokes on virtue signaling and celebrity culture (“make earth great again”), but who loses the thread when it comes to the bigger picture. Any residual goodwill I might have had evaporated with the advent of a hallucinatory dream sequence—a trope so thoroughly mined that it seems incapable of yielding novelty under any sun. Once Sacrifice has wrung what it can, humor-wise, from Mike’s narcissism and hair-loss anxiety, the film sags into déjà vu: a reheating of The Menu and Opus (which were already reheated to begin with) while managing a limp sermon on faith and authenticity without finding anything new to say about the crises that supposedly define us.