“The id grows tedious,” art critic Jackson Arn wrote recently, “when left to speak too freely.” The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude keeps his in check by grounding flourishes in pure mundanity. Near the end of Kontinental ’25, an ex-professor, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and her former student, Fred (Adonis Tanța), sit by an anti-communist resistance monument in Cluj and watch a horrific video of a drone attack on a Russian soldier. Having found the dead body of a man she evicted earlier that day, Orsolya, who now works as a bailiff, is looking to blow off some steam. They move uphill and Fred––whose delivery bag is plastered with Romanian flags, so as not to be confused with immigrant gig workers––serenades her. Next, they have sex in the bushes. The film up to this point has been awash with ideas and vaguely apocalyptic images: Roman ruins, a robot dog, a dinosaur park, zoomed-in footage of the Hindenburg disaster, a scene from Robert Aldrich’s atomic-era nightmare Kiss Me Deadly. This should all be a lot, but somehow Jude keeps it together.
Landing in-between his widely celebrated Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and upcoming Dracula project, Kontinental was always going to have the whiff of a b-side about it, but this is a rich and substantial work. Taking Romania’s housing crisis as a central theme, it bombards the viewer with triggers, sight gags, and juxtapositions. You don’t have to go too far back to recall a time when this kind of onslaught of information felt jarring, but anyone who has swiped through TikTok or Instagram Reels in the last 12 months will recognize the rhythms with rueful familiarity. No filmmaker has yet been able to capture this feeling quite so fluently as Jude, which is why he’s one of the most important working today.
Kontinental begins with the soon-to-be-evicted Ion (played by Romanian New Wave veteran Gabriel Spahiu) scavenging for bottles at a dinosaur park. Asleep in his room that night, he’s visited by police who threaten to kick him out. Rather than face a life on the street, he decides to take his own by strangulation. When Orsolya discovers his body the next day, she suffers a moral breakdown and starts traveling through the city like many a Jude protagonist before her, searching for comfort, reassurance, and validation––first through her partner, but later her mother, her best friend, and her priest. (In press note, the director has described it as an homage to Rossellini’s Europa ’51, a sentiment echoed by its poster.) Jude uses this reliable framework to go deep on a number of topics: nationalism and faith, the poisoned chalice of post-Soviet capitalism (all classic material), and the current housing crisis. It’s not exactly premium cut (the images can be a little janky and there are a few notable lags) but there is still more to chew on in any ten minutes of Kontinental ’25 than most films (even the supposedly thought-provoking ones) manage in their entire runtime.
A friend who caught an earlier preview described Kontinental ’25 to me as Jude entering his “Hong phase,” referring to the South Korean filmmaker’s recent distillation of his cinema opting for quantity, control, and spontaneity over what you might call “production value.” Jude is one of the few directors who can rival Hong’s work rate, and Kontinental does have something of the South Korean’s sauce to it: a film seemingly shot on the fly, constructed around three or four wide-ranging conversations, and one in which the characters are comically inebriated. Another reading would be to say that he has reached a similar status. It was a shock when Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn won the Golden Bear during the pandemic, but even mainstream critics were putting Do Not Expect on their year-end lists. Now Jude is being name-dropped by Martin Scorsese. He is a singular artist with bags of ideas and nothing left to prove.
Kontinental ’25 premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.