graduation-1

After an initial trailer came in April of last year, a new preview has just arrived hailing from the U.K. for Cristian Mungiu‘s new drama Graduation. Premiering at Cannes to positive reception last spring, the film will get a limited release in the U.S. this April. Judging from this preview, the drama looks to be an intensely complex, twisting film that pushes psychological drama to the verge of horror.

We said in our Cannes review, “Considering the heights he’s reached in the past, Graduation constitutes a disappointing step backwards for erstwhile Romanian New Wave front-runner Cristian Mungiu. After the painterly exorcism tale Beyond the Hills, Mungiu returns to the realist, handheld aesthetic of his first two features to middling results. Neither blackly comic like his debut, Occident, nor as searingly incisive as his Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Graduation is a well-acted and efficiently directed but schematic rehash of themes that Mungiu and his fellow new-wavers have expounded time and again over the last decade.”

See the trailer below, with a nod to The Playlist, along with an extended synopsis and poster.

Romeo, a physician living in a small mountain town in Transylvania, has raised his daughter Eliza with the idea that once she turns 18, she will leave to study abroad in the UK. But on the day before Eliza’s first entrance exam to university, she is assaulted in an attack that could jeopardise her entire future. Now Romeo has a decision to make: there are ways of solving her predicament, but not without betraying the moral principles that he, as a father, has taught Eliza throughout her life.
Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Graduation is a stunningly crafted morality play from one of European cinema’s most revered auteurs. Executed with intricate formal precision and Mungiu’s characteristically raw and authentic form of naturalism, Graduation is the mark of a filmmaker at the height of his powers.

Graduation poster

Graduation will have a limited release in the U.S. on April 7th.

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