Tara Brady

The animation, nodding to anime, web cartoons and DIY punk aesthetics, has a rough-hewn, heartfelt charm. Not every joke lands, but the generous, camp sensibility buoys the material.

It acknowledges loss without overshadowing its protagonist, passionately insisting on personhood and dignity even as the heroine’s awareness drifts away.

Dosa and her editors resist catastrophising, allowing cracking ice, flowing water and silence to shoulder the film’s emotional weight.

Stripped of the bells, the whistles and the cheering crowds, what remains is impossible to romanticise: an exhausted, tortured animal, a man performing hypermasculinity to the point of self-annihilation, and inexcusable barbarism.

At just 71 minutes, Erupcja is more sketch than statement. But its potent snapshot of roads not taken stays long after the credits have rolled.

Scoot McNairy gives Steve a dog-eared appeal that makes his irresponsibility inseparable from his warmth.

Ejiofor cleverly manifests a character caught between psychic dislocation and male privilege; Reinsve’s wounds are deeper but palpable beneath her collected facade. Mark Duplass deepens the mystery as a cryptic scientist. The bigger stars, however, are Danny Vermette’s production design and Parsons’s exquisite direction.

The film’s musical flourishes and takedown of gay and straight cliches are always amusing, if old-school end of the pier.

The friendships feel equally authentic, even when the source material, largely composed of inner monologues, can sound polemic transposed to the big screen. Enda Walsh’s script compensates with beautifully constructed interpersonal relations between swipes at capitalism, landlords and generational decline. Simon Tindall’s fluid camerawork adds to a textured sense of place.

Mundane routines acquire a creeping dread, with barns, kitchens and farmyards becoming landscapes of unspoken terror as the heroine clucks her way through a compelling story.