Nobody captures the absurdity and wretchedness of life under late capitalism quite like Radu Jude. The Romanian auteur’s latest Molotov lands us in the city of Cluj, where Ion (Gabriel Spahiu), a homeless former athlete, spends his days wandering the streets collecting recyclables and scrap metal. His surroundings are rife with contradictions: new office blocks and corporate campuses towering over old houses and burnt-out cars, streets lined with EU flags as venture capital takes a punt, casting the population aside.
Ion squats in the boiler room of an old building, which is about to be demolished to make way for a luxury hotel. One morning, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a Hungarian-Romanian bailiff, and two gendarmes arrive on behalf of a German multinational. Though she shows the scant courtesy of granting him extra time to gather his meagre effects, Ion uses the brief reprieve to kill himself. Jude turns the camera towards an eviction notice, as we hear the horrible struggle and gurgling sound of the unfortunate man’s final moments.
A perturbed Orsolya reports the suicide but receives no blame or sanction. The rest of the film traces her uneasy and frantic attempts to reconcile herself with what happened. She retells the story over and over in sensorial detail: the smell of piss, bulging eyes. She speaks to her husband, a friend, her mother, a priest, across a bar, and to a former student who now delivers food for an app. Each time she receives the same hollow reassurance: “It’s not your fault.”
Her conversations range from pointless moral debates to prayers in a park populated by plastic, mechanical dinosaurs. She gives alms: “€2 for Unicef, €2 for Ukrainian refugees, €2 for Women, Life, Freedom, €2 for Gaza.” Nothing assuages her guilt.
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In common with Jude’s scathing attack on the gig economy and toxic online c
ulture in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 takes a scattershot approach to various targets: anti-Semitism, capitalism, nationalism and religious hypocrisy. The incomparable writer-director’s dark comedy doesn’t care to resolve its heroine’s quandary; it’s out to poke with ethical heft and barbed wit.
