film

Radu Jude is surely the pre-eminent Romanian indie filmmaker of the past decade and a half, and has been responsible for such memorable, off-the-wall mini-hits as The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021, for which he won the Berlin International Film Festival's highly prestigious Golden Bear award) and 2023's Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

For his latest scattergun excavation of the dark underbelly of life in his home country, Jude takes us to Cluj-Napoca, in Transylvania, which, we are reminded at one point in the main character's search for absolution, was "stolen" by Romania from the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Eszter Tompa excels as Orsolya, a former law professor reduced to working as a bailiff. She must evict a homeless man living in the basement of a downtown building set to become a luxury hotel, but an extreme consequent event sends her into a profound and all-encompassing moral crisis.