Kontinental ’25: Radu Jude continues to find gold as he rummages through the trash of the modern condition

• Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

It’s a pleasure watching a director hit their stride and find a sure form for each film, and in his latest feature, Radu Jude takes a different route from the crazy train of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023). Kontinental ’25 observes the crisis of conscience for a bailiff wracked with guilt after evicting a man who then dies by suicide. The mix of sincerity and cynicism, played out across what is essentially a series of dialogues, gradually takes on the force of a moral parable, albeit an ambiguous one. 

Jude remains committed to responding to the world as it stands (though he’s also recently filmed a variation on Dracula), and his antennae are still up – for Romania’s wealth inequities, real estate land-grabs, and the general neoliberal creep that has results at once banal, cruel, and weird. But as always he renders his characters as actual, flawed people rather than illustrative diagrams. 

Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) works for the government of picturesque Transylvanian city Cluj, which ostensibly puts her in a position of power (in contrast to Angela, the harried PA of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World). Flanked by dopey, armoured self-cam cops, she visits a man (Gabriel Spahiu) who’s sleeping in the maintenance room of a building that’s about to be renovated and put on the market. She’s given him second chances, showing that she does have a heart – a clue that Jude isn’t pitching a story of enlightened conversion – and when he hangs himself, she sobs over what she might have done differently.  

Helplessly recounting the events to everyone and her mother, she finds sympathetic but also distracted responses. A friend suggests setting up automatic charitable donations (which is one coping method); she gets into an argument with her Hungarian mother; and a priest reframes her story for his own high-flown object lessons, which sound ennobling but dissipate faster than smoke. The encounter that sticks is with a punkish former law student, Fred (Adonis Tanta), who’s a nuisance, until Orsolya gets depressed and phones him while her husband is away on vacation with their kids.  

Tompa skilfully and unassumingly shows us someone who’s both genuinely trying to come to terms with her responsibility, and also maybe just engaging in a form of talk therapy. There’s a nice complicating peccadillo amid all her handwringing – a drunken fling with Fred, a kind of nerd-rebel who idolises her – though Jude doesn’t lean on this. (A less-noted aspect of his films’ realism is the blithely messy sex, which was central to 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, his past Golden Bear win here at the Berlinale, and seen in passing in Do Not Expect.) 

Jude and his regular DOP Marius Panduru film Orsolya’s exchanges with plain two shots, tending to tableaus and shooting with an iPhone that lends a certain present-tense translucence. But Jude continues with an ongoing project of including what might be referred to as the trash of life – not actual bin garbage, but the absurd indignities and intrusions of the modern condition. The homeless man (before his death) is harassed by a robot police dog, ridiculous yet threatening; when Orsolya confides in her friend in a public square, tinny music keeps piping in. And when she walks through a woodsy park to clear her head, she passes chintzy animatronic dinosaurs with poorly synched roars (sort of fun, but also… oy). 

Jude’s inspirations for the movie include, originally, a news item about a real female bailiff’s guilt over evicting someone who later killed themselves and of course Rossellini’s Europa 51 (1952), which stars Ingrid Bergman as a rich Rome mother who tries to find meaning through charity after her son suddenly dies. He also weaves in, or leaves in, the extant history of the places where he shoots, in this case referencing the Hungarian architecture of Cluj, which was part of territory that Romania took from Hungary over a century ago, and including political campaign billboards and their interchangeable take-charge slogans. 

As we watch Orsolya ruminate, one wonders if she’s really reacting solely to this suicide, or on some level, she’s suddenly felt the weight of all the countless tragedies that her job has required her to be complicit in, just less visibly. Stopping short of scepticism or resistance, Jude’s story might make its most radical (and perhaps implicitly despairing) point in acknowledging the scarcity of these times: change, personal or societal, requires the persistence of any conscience at all.