Film Forum

In his latest bold satire, Romanian auteur Radu Jude (BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN, DON'T EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD) takes up the spiritual crisis of educated urbanites—notching down (slightly) the absurdity, while complicating his interrogation of globalized modern life. Orsolya is a Hungarian immigrant and middle-class bureaucrat in the Romanian city of Cluj. Just after she evicts an elderly indigent man (Gabriel Spahiu, THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU) who was squatting in a building her agency sanctioned for conversion to a boutique hotel, he commits suicide. Plunged into moral crisis, Orsolya proceeds to obsess—via encounters with a friend, a former student, a priest, her mother—over her guilt. In a city where private investment drives government action and where religious conservatism deems suicide a great sin—who is the real villain? How can Orsolya—herself a victim of racism, staunch resister of her homeland’s fascism, generous donor to Ukrainian and Palestinian causes—possibly be accountable for the man’s life, and death?  

Presented with support from The Ashes and Diamonds Fund for Eastern European Film

2025     109 MIN.     ROMANIA     1-2 SPECIAL
IN ROMANIAN, HUNGARIAN, AND GERMAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

Trailer

Reviews

“Hilarious, intellectual, and richly poetic.”
– Travis Jeppesen, Artforum  
 
“Extraordinary... firmly of the moment.”
– Guy Lodge, Variety

“Spiky social satire... Radu Jude continues to find gold as he rummages through the trash of the modern condition.”
– Nicolas Rapold, Sight and Sound

“Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas... It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair. Like his previous film DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (whose lead actor Ilinca Manolache appears briefly in cameo here), Jude takes aim at bad faith and bad taste and takes us on what is almost a kind of architectural tour of Romanian malaise—this time in Cluj—in which he shows us the racism, nationalism, and a pointless obsession in the country’s governing classes with real estate and property development as a kind of universal aspiration... Jude’s film-making has such energy and punch.”
— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian