Dracula [2025]

 Romanian provocateur and lampooner Radu Jude’s Dracula – his second outing in 2025 after Kontinental '25, both shot using iPhones – was a profane dissection of Romania’s most famous export, ferocious depiction of how troubling historical events are appropriated by consumerist societies into kitschy money-spinners, and lurid commentary on the blood-sucking vampirism of AI in cinema (and arts in general). After the relatively more restrained (though no less cutting) last film, Jude returned to his maximalist ways – and further amped up his preferred episodic form – in this unhinged and outrageous work that was a brutal parody, farce, burlesque, satire and critique rolled into one. Comprising of multiple chapters of disparate lengths and tones over a three-hour length and connected by a linked narrative, the film felt uneven and overdone on occasions, while unabashedly delivering a riotous potpourri of politics, history, sex, violence, comedy, metatextual referentiality, societal takedowns, celebration of lowbrow aesthetics, and chaotic experimentation. A gleefully vulgar filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) wants to make a commercial movie on Bram Stoker’s eponymous creation (which had been inspired from the 15^th century ruler Vlad the Impaler, who’d meted out savage punishments to his opponents and is a hero for ultra-right-wing nationalists), but is creatively blocked. He therefore makes use of LLM prompts for a series of gratuitous reimaginations. They include a smutty, Dracula-themed cabaret that allows tourists to engage in carnal and violent roleplays; a sham health centre summoning the Count for psychosomatic treatments; a Dracula reincarnate outraged by his bastardization to hapless visitors; Vlad calling his ghouls to viciously break a defiant union strike; and a PhD student falling for an aristocrat’s daughter in a town haunted by a vampire, amidst religious frenzy.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Experimental Film/Anthology Film

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Kontinental '25 [2025]

 Coming on the back of his two provocative and coruscating stunners Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 felt decidedly contemplative in comparison, even if a relatively toned-down Radu Jude film too leaves one with a pungent aftertaste through cutting satire, caustic jabs and gallows humour. This was a sharp assault – carried out using a disarmingly gentle-looking scalpel – on the crushing and callous apathy of post-Communist, neoliberal Romania, marked by dismantling of social safety nets for the marginalized and vulnerable, escalating housing crises, rabid gentrification, toxic ethno-nationalism, and perhaps most ironically, the outsourcing of guilt. The film’s deliberately cheesy protagonist, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff of Hungarian ethnicity, evicts a homeless man (Gabriel Spahiu) – displaying disingenuous sympathy while arriving with intimidating bouncer-cops – from the unused boiler room of a building that’s set to be turned into a boutique hotel by a German company. That, tragically, incites the man into committing suicide, and as a result she’s plagued by a heavy outpouring of guilt, which she sobbingly unloads – over a series of deadpan conversations – onto her husband, boss, friend, mom, punkish former student, and priest, while also clarifying each tine that she wasn’t legally culpable. Jude’s scalding portrayal of inbred racism was nonpartisan; Orsolya’s cantankerous mom curses Romanians for stealing Transylvania from Hungary and for being lazy, while her Romanian husband chuckle while reading through the brazenly bigoted trolling in social media targeting her ethnicity. The film, incidentally, opened with a 20-minute near-wordless montage where we follow the soon-to-be-dead “non-person” through the city, while scoffing at the over-abundance of urban kitsch, from robot dogs to plastic dinosaurs.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Romanian/Hungarian

Country: Romania

The New Year That Never Came [2024]

 Delving into incidents linked to Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime, and the proclivity for bleak, ironic and wordy canvases, continue to be recurring motifs and tonal choices for current Romanian filmmakers too, like their trailblazing Romanian New Wave forbears. Following Metronom and Libertate from 2022 and 2023, respectively, Bogdan Mureșanu’s glorious debut feature The New Year That Never Came – a riveting hyperlinked portmanteau film that’s filled with tense paranoia, gripping desperation, cutting humour and exquisitely controlled chaos; cinematographed with understated brilliance; and set to a pulsating soundtrack – took us right into the eve of the dictator’s fall on 22^nd December 1989. The narrative, which composed of multiple interconnected strands that coalesced into a mesmeric 20-minute climactic sequence – stunningly accompanied by Ravel’s Bolero that progressively reaches its apotheosis, and wherein the claustrophobic square format dramatically changed into liberating wide-screen – crisscrossed between 6 individuals and unfolded over 2 days. TV station Director Stefan (Mihai Calin) must rapidly replace the footage of an actress in a pean to Ceaușescu as she’s defected; theatre actress Florina (Nicoleta Hancu), chosen as the replacement, wants to lose this “opportunity” at any cost; Stafan’s son, ironically, is on a reckless defection plan himself; the latter is under surveillance of state security officer Ionut (Iulian Postelnicu), whose aged mother wants to cling to her old apartment slated for demolition; meanwhile Gelu (Adrian Vancica), a factory worker tasked with shifting furniture, has just realized that his son has naively posted a letter that could get him executed. Hancu was the standout among the excellent cast, while Gelu’s story – redone from an acclaimed short by Mureșanu – was the most hilarious in this dazzling tapestry that gradually built towards an explosive crescendo.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Bogdan Muresanu

Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Political Satire

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Libertate (Freedom) [2023]

 Revolutions, once shorn of the allure of romanticism, can be bloody, messy and grimy affairs, and that’s the first thing that one notices in Tudor Giurgiu’s thrilling film Libertate, which takes us right into its violent, chaotic and unpredictable midst. What one also notices is the director’s audacious gambit in filming with an absurdly large ensemble cast that must’ve necessitated meticulous orchestration while rendering the madness. In a country obsessed with episodes from the Ceausescu era, the dictator’s fall from power – the only one among the “Revolutions of 1989” that experienced violence – and its immediate aftermaths, it’s certainly not easy to find new stories; Giurgiu surprisingly succeeded in that. This ironically titled work – contrary to the rousing sentiments it alludes to, the film is anything but triumphal – chronicled the brutal confrontation that ensues during Ceausescu’s overthrow, followed by a period of absurdist stalemate, in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. Little did police officer Viorel (Alex Calangiu) know, upon leaving for work on the fateful day of the uprising, that he'd barely survive by the skin of his neck and return after months in bizarre captivity. When shots are fired into protestors by unknown assailants, a vicious pandemonium takes the city to the brink of civil war, and pits four mutually hostile factions against each other – the army, police, secret service and civilians. The army eventually seizes the upper hand, and holds more than 500 people – belonging to the latter groups, with each accusing the other of being lackeys and terrorists – in an emptied swimming pool. The narrative shifted at a breakneck pace between diverse characters, interlocking verbal clashes and psychological duels, taking the film to a bleak anti-climactic finale.

Director: Tudor Giurgiu

Genre: Thriller/Historical Thriller

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World [2023]

 Radu Jude reaffirmed his position as a defiantly radical and daring filmmaker with this dazzling and damning work that combined cutting satire, outrageous humour, dizzying metatextual references, scalding political commentaries, and subversive neo-Marxian dialectics. These, along with its multi-segmental structure and anarchic experimentations, made this a striking follow-up to his fabulous previous film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is an underpaid, overworked production assistant who drives around Bucharest auditioning victims of workplace accidents, for a dubious corporate documentary sponsored by an Austrian organization. Filmed in low-fi B/W capturing her gig employment, this strand is frequently intercut with two seemingly dissonant threads – parodic and inflammatory TikTok videos, shot in saturated colours, that Angela makes as a side hustle, using a sleazy, trash talking, misogynistic, neo-Nazi alter-ego called Bobiță; and snippets from the feminist Ceaușescu-era film Angela Moves On, shot in glorious retro colours, featuring a lonely woman taxi driver (Dorina Lazar). They ultimately coalesced into the bleakly funny final segment – a bravura 40-minute single-take static sequence – showing how a wheelchair-bound man is craftily coerced into presenting a false narrative in the said promotional movie, wherein the blame is conveniently shifted from the employer to him, and his agency too is stripped in the process. With references ranging from Goethe and Lumière to Godard and Dylan, this 3-hour epic comprised of deadpan detours – as in a rambling conversation with a corporate exec (Nina Hoss) that segues into a silent tracking shot memorializing vehicular casualties – and dealt with neoliberalism, exploitation, discrimination, media manipulation, cultural toxicity, war, fascism, etc. The film, interestingly, featured self-reflexive cameos by hack director Uwe Boll and Lazar reprising her role from the referenced film.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire

Language: Romanian/English

Country: Romania

Metronom [2022]

 Iconoclastic RJ, audiophile and jazz aficionado Cornel Chiriac hosted the popular music show Metronom in Radio România between 1967 and 1969, until its cancellation by the authorities, his defection to West Germany, and relaunching the show as part of Radio Free Europe. That eponymous show served as the driving force and motif for this time capsule awash in mood, melancholy and memories. Its director Alexandru Belc was earlier the AD to Romanian New Wave trailblazers Mungiu, Porumboiu and Puiu, and their dry, conversational, faux-realist minimalism and formal exactitude were amply evident here, perhaps indicating a second generation of filmmakers continuing what their predecessors had started. The film is structured as a three-act piece set over 24 hours in 1972. In the low-key first act, the striking and reserved Ana (Mara Bugarin) experiences heartbreak upon learning that her high-school boyfriend Sorin (Serban Lazarovici) is emigrating to West Berlin. The engrossing second act is set in the apartment of Ana’s rebellious friend where their classmates have congregated to secretly listen to their idol Chiriac’s radio programme, drink, dance, and write a letter denouncing Ceaușescu’s totalitarian state; Ana, defying her parents’ instructions, joins the party, hoping for a final fling before Sorin’s departure. Their world, however, comes crashing when they get arrested by the Securitate, with the focus shifting to a tense psychological duel between a menacing senior officer (Vlad Ivanov, in a typically show-stealing turn that he’s made his own) and the defiant Ana. The excellent soundtrack featured the haunting Cu Pleoapa De Argint and pop/rock classics – including a lazily beautiful sequence set to The Doors’ Light My Fire –, while its camerawork comprised of atmospheric palettes and terrific single takes.

Director: Alexandru Belc

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

R.M.N. [2022]

 Cristian Mungiu’s proclivity for crafting singularly oppressive and viscerally haunting films harbouring sharp political critique, the ramifications of which transcend the tight spatial and temporal scopes of their microcosmic parables, have made him a powerful voice in contemporary cinema. R.M.N. – with its bleak, sparse, formally bravura and deeply discomfiting portrayal of xenophobia and fetid nationalism – made for yet another gripping inclusion to his canon. That toxic suspicion, prejudice and hatred towards others are manifested in a multicultural and geographically fluid milieu – one where the inhabitants are of multi-ethnic descent, regularly switch between languages (predominantly Romanian and Hungarian, with spattering of German, French and English thrown in), have emigrated over generations, and keep relocating to other European countries in search of work where they often face racial discrimination and social denigration – made the proceedings all the more ironic. Matthias (Marin Grigore), a Romani migrant worker, quits his lowly job in Germany after one racial slur too many and returns to his village in Transylvania – financially struggling upon the closure of the local mine – where he grapples with his marriage to his estranged wife (Macrina Bârlădeanu) who’s had enough of his boorish masculinity and incessant philandering, tries to “fix” his young son who’s emotionally regressed, struggles with his father’s health, and hopes to rekindle his affair with Csilla (Judith State) who’s an accomplished manager at a local bread factory. The threads tenuously holding this place together, however, irrevocably unravel when Sri Lankan workers are hired at the factory. These led us to the film’s pièce de résistance – a virtuoso 17-minute sequence shot in an unbroken take and featuring a dense, divisive crowd – which powerfully underscored its political urgency and formal brilliance.

Director: Cristian Mungiu

Genre: Drama/Political Drama

Language: Romanian/Hungarian/French/German/English

Country: Romania

Întregalde [2021]

 Radu Muntean’s excellent new film Întregalde had all the quintessential hallmarks of Romanian New Wave – the kind championed by Muntean himself in his memorable Tuesday, After Christmas from a decade back – viz. narrative sparseness, ultra-realism, formal rigour, voluble script, bone-dry humour, lack of non-diagetic sounds, long and unobtrusive single takes, and near real-time filming. He expertly infused these with atmosphere, tenseness and brewing suspense that made it akin to a slow-burn thriller, in striking juxtaposition to the deliberately paced and darkly satirical human drama. The film began with an exquisite mise-en-scène wherein a terrific tracking shot – with a gently roving camera moving through a crowded space – took us amidst the volunteers of a philanthropic social service group, who’re embarking on trips to small villages to distribute essential items to the destitute on the occasion of Christmas. The narrative then zooms in to three of them – Maria (Maria Popistaşu), Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu) and Dan (Alex Bogdan) – who’re travelling together in an off-roader vehicle to the titular Transylvanian village. On the way they pick up an elderly and possibly senile man called Kante (Luca Sabin) who suggests a short-cut to their destination, and that’s when their lucks take a nose-dive. As things go south in an uninhabited and bitingly cold environ, incommunicado to the outside world, their temper, morality and sense of charity undergo nerve-racking pressure tests. Sabin, an amateur actor and apparently an actual resident of the eponymous village, was extraordinary as the wiry, garrulous and unpredictable man stuck in a time warp – portrayed through audacious single takes where he blabbers endlessly – and served as the fillip to the gripping narrative, and in turn the three edgy, brilliantly enacted volunteers.

Director: Radu Muntean

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn [2021]

 Radu Jude, in his loopy, pungent, delirious, absurdist, provocative, funny and formally adventurous film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, served a scalding, ferocious and no-holds-barred indictment of conservative bourgeois morality, and in turn the Romanian society. It boldly navigated through amateur smut, dry realism, kaleidoscopic montage, political satire, black comedy and unfettered farce, alongside a salacious prologue and a wickedly playful three-act structure. The film’s premise involved Emi (Katia Pascariu), a capable history teacher at an elite school, whose job comes under fire when a public scandal erupts around her on account of a leaked sex tape that’s gone viral. It begins with an unsimulated home video – featuring Pascariu herself – where the couple’s acts were often hilariously interspersed with voices from other rooms speaking about medicines to be purchased and kid’s toys to be sanitized. That latter point, which unequivocally foregrounded the movie in the Covid-era, was further established in the terrific first segment, “One-Way Street”, where we see Emi walking endlessly through the streets of Bucharest running various errands, while tension gradually mounts as she’s been summoned for an emergency parent-teacher meeting; and, while she goes about walking, we see the brash machismo, misogyny, consumerism and social media driven fake news that the city has become infested with. The fabulous middle segment, “Short Dictionary of Anecdotes, Signs and Wonders”, was a scathing and stunningly crafted montage covering a dizzying range of topics from Romania’s past and present, including Nazi-era massacres, Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime, the Church’s complicity, the 1989 revolution, xenophobia, sexual hypocrisy, neoliberalism, etc. And finally, in “Praxis and Innuendoes (Sitcom)”, Emi faces a hostile, sanctimonious, and lascivious kangaroo court which explodes into the wackiest climax imaginable.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Malmkrog [2020]

 If the Romanian New Wave filmmakers – of which Cristi Puiu remains a singular voice – would have us believe, Romanians are an irascible, dry-as-bones and loquacious people; now, while that might’ve been a deliberately cultivated stylistic choice, it added strikingly discernible flavours to their movies. Puiu’s astounding previous feature Sieranevada was filled to brim with rambling, ironic, deadpan, free-flowing and deliciously eclectic conversations amongst dysfunctional family members who’ve assembled at a cramped apartment. He took that formal thread – viz. a group of people conversing indoors on interconnected subjects – to boldly modernist but also oftentimes exasperating levels in Malmkrog. The similarity, however, ended there considering the lush period setting, spacious interiors, largely static shots (filmed using customary long single takes) and overtly literal diatribes demanding an attentive mind and patient nerves, as opposed to everyday people and intricately staged tracking shots in the previous film. The conversations were especially pertinent given its adaptation from a Vladimir Soloviev text – which Puiu referred for an earlier experimental endeavor as well – and that served as the basis for dense, crisscrossing and verbose discourses around religious wars, Christian morality, ethnicity, European-ness, “End of History”, etc. The narrative, which bounced across multiple languages, focused on six individuals at a lavish, snow-shrouded manor house in Transylvania – a garrulous, cynical aristocrat (Frédéric Schulz-Richard); a general’s war-loving wife (Diana Sakalauskaité); a devout, staunchly pacifist woman (Marina Palii); a mock-serious nobleman whose sophistry barely conceals his Euro-centric racialism (Ugo Broussot); and an enigmatic, articulate woman (Agathe Bosch); and, they were counterpointed in passing with the domestic help. The rigorously structured and framed 200-minute film, interestingly, started with underlying levity, but grew increasingly heavy, serious, and ultimately edgy, sarcastic and confrontational.

 

 

 

Director: Cristi Puiu

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama

Language: Romanian/Russian/French/Hungarian/German

Country: Romania