TIFTY TWOFERS: TIFF 2025 REVIEWS
If I had a nickel for how many films I saw at TIFF that featured both Charli XCX and a devastating volcanic eruption, I would only have two nickels, but isn’t it weird that it happened twice?
By Tamar Hanstke
As a follower of Charli’s work, but not knowledgeable enough to consider myself a dedicated fan, it is nonetheless clear that she is an artist on a mission: Following her massively successful album brat in the summer of 2024, Charli has refused to slow down, spending the succeeding year and a half, among other things, marrying her longtime partner George Daniel, signing on to do a musical accompaniment album for Emerald Fennel’s 2026 Wuthering Heights adaptation, and appearing in two TIFF world premieres, Pete Ohs’ Erupcja and Roman Gavras’ Sacrifice. I was rooting for Charli to be one of those musicians who seamlessly transition into the acting sphere—dare I say, a contemporary David Bowie or Cher?—and these two films present a strong case that the breakneck speed of her artistic accomplishments cannot undermine their merit.
Beginning with Erupcja, Charli’s debut as a lead actress (and also serving as co-screenwriter), this film’s aesthetics almost seem to have been preserved in a time capsule of early 2010s Tumblr culture, carefully dug up from the earth and given life anew. Having been, myself, a dedicated Tumblr user during that period, there was a delightful sense of nostalgia in seeing that very specific visual style washing over a theatre screen in 2025–complete with an ambiguously sapphic connection between the female leads that would have been particularly on-brand for Tumblr’s insatiable community of ‘shippers’ of fictional queer relationships.
Charli’s performance in the film is naturalistic, spontaneous, “real”. I was reminded of the American actresses who were tempted across the pond in the 1960s and ‘70s to appear in French New Wave films (as depicted in Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague), where their characteristic beauty and performative affect were dismantled by experimental stylistic and filming techniques that provided already-talented performers with a particularly novel showcase for their acting abilities. Like these actresses before her, Charli proves more than up to the task, largely disappearing into a role that those who are not previously familiar with Charli would likely be hard-pressed to identify as a breakout acting role for a celebrity musician.
In fact, Charli’s character, Bethany, emerges as the enigma at the center of the narrative, with much of the film instead taking place from the perspective of two people who are drawn to her like moths to the flame: Her long-time female friend, Nel, living in Poland; and her boyfriend, Rob, who is initially oblivious that Bethany chose Poland as a travel destination largely in order to reconnect with Nel rather than spend quality time with him. His obliviousness becomes painful as he sets the wheels in motion to propose to Bethany on this trip, while she becomes increasingly avoidant. One of the hindrances of this narrative approach is that, despite the enigmatic relationship between Bethany and Nel being the most intriguing part of the film, much of the runtime is spent charting the misadventures of would-be fiancé Rob, traipsing aimlessly around Poland without any idea of where Bethany has run off to now.
While this melancholic lingering sometimes over-stretches the film’s otherwise brisk runtime of 82 minutes, the beautiful and confident visual style carries the viewer through, keeping us engrossed as we anticipate learning the mystery behind the recent volcanic eruption that is clearly so significant to Bethany and Nel…
Sacrifice, coincidentally, also opens with images of a volcano, this one on the verge of a catastrophic eruption that drives the film’s abrupt change in tone and style after the first act. Here, Charli only appears in a brief cameo, playing a fictionalized and self-satirical version of herself—a glamorous pop musician dressed up as “Mother Nature” as she performs at a celebrity gala devoted to combatting climate change. It is her musical performance that bridges the film’s two distinct sections: Initially, a satirical look at celebrity environmental activism, and then, a much more sincere and fantastic story about the potential to save the world through selfless self-sacrifice.
If you were told you could save the world by sacrificing your life—and, as part of this sacrifice, you would die before knowing for certain that you really did save the world—would you do it? This is the question that confronts Chris Evans’ washed-up celebrity Mike Tyler, a former A-list actor who is now trying, rather pathetically, to salvage his image as a handsome and charismatic leading man. In real life, Chris Evans himself has experienced a dramatic shift in the types of Hollywood roles offered to him, transitioning rather abruptly from the brash and sarcastic characters he played in such films as Fantastic Four and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, to a more pure and goodhearted image exemplified by Marvel hero Steve Rogers/Captain America. Since the end of his run in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (for now…), Evans has seemingly been trying out a return to that earlier star image, as in Knives Out, or, to a lesser degree, in The Materialists; yet I would argue that Sacrifice offers his best acting work to date, blending both the soft and abrasive parts of his acting persona for a character that is often reprehensible, yet entirely realistic and even relatable in his responses to the increasingly unbelievable scenario unfolding around him.
Indeed, Evans frequently upstages much more acclaimed performers—such as Vincent Cassel and Anya Taylor-Joy—with his deft flip-flopping between hollow arrogance and a pitiful, yet discomfortingly human expression of fear and cowardice. The question as to whether Mike Tyler would sacrifice himself to save the world is in question not just because of the ambiguity as to whether a group of eco-terrorists, led by Taylor-Joy, are actually communing with a volcano and accurately conveying its demand for human sacrifice; but just as much because, even if he was entirely certain that his death would save the world, Tyler is painfully self-serving to the point that even this proposition would be almost unthinkable to consent to. It is this complexity and slowly emerging humanity that hold the film together through its many narrative shifts.
For many, some combination of these aspects—the massive tonal shift, the endless indecision of Evans’ character, even the rather unexpected conclusion—has simply proved to be too much experimentation to overcome. Out of all of the press screenings I attended, the one for Sacrifice was the most palpably divisive, with dead silence following the film’s climactic ending that was broken only by a single voice asking incredulously, “Seriously?”. A wave of affirmative chuckles followed, and when the film definitively ended, a scattering of claps were once again met with almost deafening silence from the majority of the attendees.
Despite this divisiveness, I remain firm in my conviction immediately following seeing the film, which is that the ending is not a cop-out or some kind of empty provocation, but rather a real challenge to the sense of ambivalence or helplessness many of us carry in relation to climate change. If you could save the world by sacrificing your life, and you would therefore never know if you were actually successful, would you do it? I do not know, myself, if I would be brave enough to do so, and as a rather staunch environmentalist and humanist, I respect this film’s uncomfortable provocation to consider how far I would be willing to go to uphold what I consider my most deeply held beliefs. Regardless of anyone’s individual response to the film as a whole, I see the questions it is asking as vital and, really, the only responsible response to the climate disaster facing us and our planet.
While these films may share only the intriguing coincidence of Charli’s acting presence and the narrative importance of volcanoes, they serve too as a complimentary pairing of opposites: One nostalgic and looking backward to the past, one anxious and looking to the future; one individualistic, one radically communal; one full of stylistic excess that is warm and familiar, and one that is excessive in an entirely different register, initially marked by cold, barren locales that eventually give way to lush nature that is terrifying in its sheer ambivalence to human life. Taken together, Charli XCX has certainly made quite a splash in her dual acting debuts at TIFF, and I eagerly look forward to her—multiple!—subsequent films already in post-production for release next year.
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