Director: Radu Jude

Stars: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanta, Annamária Biluska, Oana Mardare

Shot on an iPhone in ten days, Romanian director Radu Jude's feature follow-up to the bonkers and brilliant satire ‘Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’ is not as anarchic and sprawling, but it’s fizzing with curiosity and cheeky wit. The excellent Eszter Tompa is Orsolya, a Hungarian immigrant living in the Northwestern Romanian town of Cluj. Orsolya is a bailiff who has been charged with evicting a homeless man Ion (Spahiu, star of Romanian classic ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’) from a cellar in a building that is due to be demolished to make way for the construction of the titular hotel. When he commits suicide, Orsoyla desperately searches for atonement. Initially she tries talking to her husband before they go on holiday to Greece, a trip Orsoyla ends up dropping out of. Her friend Dorina (Oana) is sympathetic, her no-nonsense mother (Biluska) less so, while the counsel of a priest proves hopeless. Only a conversation with one of her former students (Tanta), a self-proclaimed Zen Buddhist now working as a delivery rider, seems to lift Orsoyla, at least momentarily, out of her torpor. Predominantly the picture consists of a series of conversations filmed in long static takes, but the dialogue is witty, cheeky and bracingly discursive, nodding from everything from Brecht to Ice-T. The depiction of Cluj, which includes a cut-price Jurassic Park exhibition in a local park, is drolly drab.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Bluesky