Film Forum

(2017, Constantin Popescu) Every parent’s harrowing nightmare — a couple’s daughter goes missing. Popescu’s breakthrough film. DCP. Approx. 152 min.

Reviews

“Muscular hard-art fare that… could propel Popescu into the upper ranks of his country’s auteurs... Popescu makes a disquieting virtue of the ultra-wide frame throughout, particularly as Tudor grows more isolated within it: Each time he returns to the park, as becomes obsessive habit, his daughter’s potential avenues of disappearance stretch out more tauntingly in every direction; later, when stray snapshots from the scene are combed for any conceivable clues, the camera lens’s redefinition of space briefly calls Antonioni’s Blow-Up to mind. Popescu has a knack for staggering multiple lines of tension and conversation in a scene, fleetingly tuning into an assortment of unexplained fringe exchanges and human tableaux: an escalating, absurd altercation between an elderly woman and a dog-walker in the park, for example, or an unidentified woman’s passing grimace of anguish in a police station corridor.”
– Guy Lodge, Variety