‘Kontinental ’25’ Review: A Transylvanian Bailiff Tries to Ease Her Guilty Conscience in Radu Jude’s Droll and Biting iPhone Comedy
There are any number of unique and memorable lines in Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s characteristically stinging “Kontinental ’25,” but the most trenchant of them all is borrowed secondhand from Bertolt Brecht: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.” Cynically referring to the Trotskyists accused in the show trials that Stalin staged in Moscow as part of the Great Purge, Brecht’s comment is still debated in part because its degree of sincerity is so hard to parse.
Jude’s own provocations (including “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” and “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”) tend to wear their heart on their sleeve more than most public figures could at the height of the Soviet Union, but their side-eyed profiles of today’s social ills are similarly caustic and cagey all at once. Jude’s sympathies are as generous as his arguments are damning, and the friction created between those forces has sparked some of the only recent comedies that feel as complex and absurd as real life has become.
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His latest film is another one of those.
Shot on an iPhone with the same crew that Jude had already collected for his forthcoming epic about the Dracula myth, “Kontinental ’25” naturally feels like the scrappy and scabrous B-side to a larger project about Transylvanian self-identity. Its moral dimensions are more straightforward than those in Jude’s previous work (and its form much simpler in kind), but only because their practical applications are that much knottier in return. Where “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” and “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” scaled their characters’ personal depravities against sprawling backdrops of systemic abuse, the far more intimate — and less uproarious — “Kontinental ’25” filters the perversity of neoliberalism through the eyes of a well-meaning woman’s attempt to do the right thing. Alas, a bold act of kindness can be a terrible cross to bear in a culture that’s sustained by ambient cruelties.
The woman’s name is Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and she’s a middle-aged, upper-middle-class bailiff who was born in Hungary before she moved to the rapidly gentrifying Romanian city of Cluj — or at least to a hilly suburb on the outskirts of town, where she lives with her husband and their two kids in the kind of house that likely priced out the local population and paved over generations of personal history. Consciously or not, Orsolya has played an active role in such urban growth; her job is to evict people from the lots that have been gobbled up by the government and/or greedy real estate developers who want to turn them into condos, chain stores, and luxury hotels. It’s a job that she tries to perform humanely, though a cynic might say that she only does so in order to live with the fact that the job itself is inhumane.
Orsolya’s ability to compartmentalize — soon to be tested like never before — is reflected in the bifurcated structure of the film that Jude builds around her, which begins with a completely different character who will come to wish that he had never crossed paths with this story’s true protagonist. Indeed, Orsolya only enters the picture after we spend 15 minutes or so following the homeless man (Gabriel Spahiu) who lives in the boiler room of the movie’s titular address, an old apartment building that’s due to be renovated into a luxury hotel.
A little spittle shy of Denis Lavant’s Monsieur Merde but similarly hostile towards the modern world, the man mutters his way through a Cluj — “Oh fuck. Bloody fuck. Fucking shit” — so hopelessly commercialized that the streets are filled with robot dogs and the hiking trails in the city hills are littered with animatronic dinosaurs. The sudden appearance of a velociraptor in the extreme foreground of Jude’s documentary-like footage triggers the first good chuckle in a movie that derives most of its humor from incidental details and real-world reference points, a tendency best encapsulated by one character’s hilariously backhanded mention of a recent NEON-released hit.
When Orsolya knocks on the man’s door with an army of trigger-happy policemen at her back, the bailiff — in her infinite mercy — agrees to give the guy some time to collect his belongings. When she and the cops return a few minutes later, they find that the man has left the premises on his terms. Which is to say that he’s fatally severed his neck by hanging himself from the radiator with some rusty chicken wire.
From that moment on, this story firmly belongs to Orsolya, who’s so shaken by her complicity in the man’s suicide that — horror of horrors — she can’t stomach the thought of joining her husband and their kids on a family trip to Greece (Jude doesn’t belabor how Romanians feel about the country’s Hungarian minority, but we note that Orsolya is something of an outsider, while the homeless man was once the pride of his country for competing in the Balkan Games). Instead, she stays behind to think on her sins, and to find someone who might be able to put her soul at ease. Her boss. A friend. A former student. Even a priest. Orsolya has no shortage of people to turn to, the only problem is that none of them give a shit.
Jude credits the abrupt shift in focus to a rewatch of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” but his own work is so pliable and prone to changing shape that the sudden pivot to Orsolya doesn’t require any further citation. Then again, everything in the characteristically hyper-literate “Kontinental ’25” is shaped by influence and allusion, which itself points back to Jude’s singular predilection for refracting film history through the prism of modern life. The movie itself is essentially just one big riff on Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” another hyper-topical story about a guilt-stricken woman’s search for peace.
To that point, Jude credits his consumer-grade camera choice as an homage to Rossellini’s “poverty of means,” and though I longed for the 16mm richness of “Do Not Expect Too Much…,” the flat digital affect he achieves with an iPhone here proves a fitting complement to a dry comedy so concerned with the banality of neoliberal ethics. Where that film salvaged a scintilla of monochrome romance from the dreariness of the gig economy, this one is every bit as determined to sap the joy out of making good money at someone else’s expense.
The deadpan fun comes from Orsolya’s futile search for a shoulder to cry on. She wants someone to tell her that she’s a good person, but the chorus of voices she hears from are so distressingly on her side that she — or at least we — can’t help but question what being a good person would even mean in this context. Her boss’ reaction is to mock Orsolya’s guilt and ridicule her self-image as the Oskar Schindler of their office. Her friend responds with her own story about dealing with a homeless man before shrugging her shoulders at a problem she’s powerless to solve on her own.
Separated by interstitial shots of Cluj’s ahistorical new architecture, these long and static confessional scenes are spiked with Jude’s recognizably mordant wit, their dialogue timely enough to distract from the feeling of shooting fish in a barrel. “Kontinental ’25” is the first scripted feature I’ve seen that names and responds to the Palestinian genocide, if only in the context of how Orsolya’s financial support for the people of Gaza and Ukraine (two Euros a month to each!) complicates her complicity in the pain of Romania’s own citizens. Her heart is in the right place, but what good does that do for anyone besides herself?
It’s only during the film’s later scenes, when Orsolya’s moral dilemma is diffused into some of her other deficiencies and the fact of her powerlessness unravels to reveal the mess it leaves behind, that “Kontinental ’25” is able to flower into something a bit more biting and unruly. Jude tends to be at his impish best whenever his movies assume a more explicitly meta-textual bent, and so the director’s fans should know to buckle up when Orsolya meets a former student of hers — a young man obsessed with zen koans and Ice-T — at a cinema-themed bar, a poster for “We Live in Time” pasted on the wall behind them.
Things never approach the gonzo debauchery of Jude’s more boisterous comedies (the most shocking moments here are almost entirely limited to the stuff of wild conversations), but it’s safe to say that “Kontinental ’25” comes into its own as Orsolya’s reaction to her role in the homeless man’s suicide grows too complicated to be explained by guilt alone. Her entire world gets warped around her desire to live with herself, and Jude’s comedy is ultimately so raw — so laced with the wounding humor of self-recognition — not because Orsolya’s methods seem to pull her further away from the source of her problem, but rather because doing so is precisely what makes them effective at accomplishing that goal.
The cosmic joke at the center of “Kontinental ’25” is that systems of cruelty depend on millions of people feeling just guilty enough not to feel guilty at all, and the reality is that its punchline was never going to be at Orsolya’s expense. After all, she’s as innocent as it gets.
Grade: B+
“Kontinental ’25” premiered at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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