In a decrepit theme park on the outskirts of Cluj, a homeless man shuffles his way down unkempt, leaf-strewn paths, foraging for trash or treasure, and paying little mind to the creaky animatronic dinosaurs that tinnily roar as he passes. It’s an image that encapsulates the friction between comedy and tragedy, the banal and the bizarre, the real and the artificial, that powers Radu Jude‘s extraordinary new film “Kontinental ’25.” In it, the prolific Romanian writer-director dials back the heightened gonzo experimentation of his recent work to reflect the world as it is, which still permits ample room for the inexplicable. An obsolete, cut-rate Jurassic Park holds no wonder in this searing indictment of crumbling social care in a post-socialist economy: Humanity can prey on itself just fine.
Following 2023’s “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” a dizzyingly ambitious, eccentric workplace satire that ran nearly three hours, this crisp, linear film might seem an uncharacteristically straightforward proposition from a routinely challenging, sui generis director. Still, nothing about “Kontinental ’25” is easy, from its scabrous anger to its layered political and historical commentary to one particular vignette of human desperation so abject, it haunts the viewer as much as it does the film’s guilt-plagued protagonist. It’s hard to see the arthouse distributors that have backed such thorny Jude provocations as “Do Not Expect…” or “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” passing on this starker but equally high-impact title, his third to premiere in Berlin’s main competition.
The title is a reference to “Europe ’51,” the 1951 Roberto Rossellini film that was a key influence on Jude in the shaping of his story. In that film, Ingrid Bergman played the wealthy, unfeeling wife of an industrialist, attempting a humanitarian heel-turn in the wake of personal tragedy. That trajectory is roughly mirrored in “Kontinental ’25,” though the particulars are very different: For middle-aged bailiff Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), it is a stranger’s suicide that sends her into a spiral of shame over her complicity in state capitalism and a worsening national housing crisis. She, too, seeks a kind of redemption, though her every gesture toward that is inadequate and self-serving: Less satirical than it is openly despairing, Jude’s film paints a bleak picture of systemic inequality undented by individual action.
Opening on the aforementioned dinosaur attraction, the film’s patiently sustained and gradually revealing opening sequence follows the homeless man, Ion (Gabriel Spahiu), as he slowly walks the streets and sidewalks of the unofficial Transylvanian capital, collecting litter for paltry remuneration, begging outdoor diners for change, and eventually arriving at his place of residence — the cramped, dark basement boiler room of a handsome inner-city apartment building. It’s unclear how long he’s been squatting there, but his time is up: Having already issued several warnings, Orsolya arrives at his door with an eviction notice, promising to find him a place in a shelter if he leaves promptly. “You have to treat people nicely,” she tells the assisting gendarmes after granting Ion 20 minutes to pack his things, during which time, in an unsparing scene, the wretched man hangs himself from a radiator with steel wire.
It’s a visual that the viewer might find difficult to shake. Certainly the stunned Orsolya cannot do so, as in the days that follow, she proceeds to relay the incident to absolutely anybody who will listen, from her sympathetic friend Dorina (Mardare Oana) to her more hardened mother (Annamária Biluska) to her priest (Serban Pavlu), who blandly assures her that she needn’t feel any guilt, as no one is without sin. She’s equally absolved at work, where colleagues insist that she was “more than humane” in doing her job — though none of this assuages Orsolya’s conscience, as the feeling gnaws at her that merely doing her job was the problem in the first place.
A chance encounter with delivery rider Fred (Adonis Tanta, in a kinetic, focus-pulling turn) is more stimulating: A former student from her previous job as a law professor, he responds so laterally to her trauma, with a mixture of cod zen philosophy and irreverent nihilism, that she’s briefly pulled out of her self-pity. What led to her change in career is never specifically addressed, though it’s emblematic of a wider social turn toward profit over principle. Tompa’s superb performance outlines the better version of herself that Orsolya would like to be, not least through her sincere, searching expressions of grief, but that integrity is often blurred by glibness and complacency. Her perennially furrowed face briefly clears when she makes a charity donation via Revolut — a moral dopamine hit, effectively — only for the fog to quickly settle again on her brow.
As ever in Jude’s work, “Kontinental ’25” is rich in playful connections to all manner of other texts, including a patchwork of classic films referenced less obviously than “Europe ’51.” There’s a witty structural nod to “Psycho,” with its jarring shift in character focus that also teasingly positions Orsolya as a murderer, while she briefly happens upon the savage 1945 noir “Detour” on TV, a very different tale of strangulation and tortured conscience. Jude’s own filmmaking, however, is firmly of the moment. Shot fast and loose on an iPhone — so fast, in fact, that eagle-eyed viewers may spot a poster for the fall release “We Live in Time” in the background of one scene — the film’s images are hard-textured and determinedly unlovely, leaning away from Cluj’s touristic appeal.
Substantial montages are instead devoted to the city’s surfeit of new construction projects, none of them in aid of housing the poor, and urban statues of various long-forgotten statesmen, now dwarfed by the bricks and mortar of progress. Atop its devastating human portraiture, “Kontinental ’25” functions as a snapshot of a city as fragmented and anguished as Rossellini’s Rome: Jude’s take on neo-realism, if you will, for an absurdist age.
