Continuing his prolific streak, Romanian director Radu Jude premiered two features last year, the latter of which, Dracula, arrived in theaters last fall. Now, his first premiere of 2025, Kontinental ’25, will finally hit U.S. theaters starting March 27. Ahead of 1-2 Special’s release, the new trailer has now arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “When Orsolya oversees the eviction of a local elderly man in Cluj, Transylvania, the unintended consequences come to shatter her and her understanding of her place in society. Spiraling into an existential crisis, she traverses the city, meeting with various people in her life — her husband, an old friend, her former student, a priest — to consider and reconcile her place in an increasingly maddening modern world in award-winning filmmaker Radu Jude’s latest furious and hysterical moral parable.”
Rory O’Connor said in his review, “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.”
See the trailer below.
