R.M.N.: there’s a sharp sting in this Transylvanian tale

• Reviewed from the 2023 Tromsø International Film Festival

Cristian Mungiu’s new film, R.M.N., could simply mean Romania. Take out the vowels and that’s what you get. Or it could refer to the Romanian for ‘M.R.I.’ – a sort of investigation, a probing to find out what’s wrong. Because in this fable of intolerance in a small Transylvanian village, something is most certainly wrong. Everything gets distorted, and mistranslation, misinformation, nationality, ethnicity, identity and history come to mingle very uncomfortably.

Matthias (Marin Grigore) is at work, gutting sheep in an abattoir in Germany, when a phone call from home upsets him so much that he assaults a foreman and leaves, hitchhiking back home to Romania down the wintry autobahns with little more than the clothes on his back. His son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi) has seen something in the woods which has left him traumatised and mute. It is a situation that Matthias, with his blunt view of masculinity, is poorly equipped to deal with. Rudi’s mother, Matthias’s estranged wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu), isn’t particularly pleased to see her ex return, relegating him firmly to the couch. And she has good reason. No sooner is he back than he’s also visiting Csilla (Judith State), his bourgeois Hungarian lover.

Csilla is in the final stages of applying for lucrative European funding at the local industrial bakery she manages, and in the process employing extra workers in order to qualify for a bigger grant. As locals are either abroad or unwilling to work for the minimum wage, Csilla hires Sri Lankan migrant workers to fill the roles. In the evening she plays the cello, drinks large glasses of red wine and enjoys sex with Matthias, whose appeal seems primarily to be physical. He’s a lug with a habit of turning up to stare through her windows at night, part randy schoolboy, part would-be stalker. He continues to hang around: he’s burnt his bridges in Germany, and his father Otto (Andrei Finți) – the one getting the MRI – is ailing.

Since his 2004 debut feature Occident, Mungiu’s career has progressed with the grimly determined, steadfast pace of a seasoned woodsman climbing a steep hill to deliver some bad news. His second film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, triumphed at Cannes in 2007, and Beyond the Hills (2012) and Graduation (2016) solidified his reputation as a darkly funny, deeply intelligent filmmaker and a scabrous critic of Romanian society. The people (usually women) in his films are trapped in unfair, unjust dilemmas that squeeze them as they attempt to escape. Lumpen ignorance – whether manifesting in religious fanaticism, outdated laws or glacial bureaucracy – proves crushing, sometimes fatally so.

Despite its Transylvanian setting, R.M.N. is a broader work of commentary. This is partly because its exploration of xenophobia and intolerance resonates throughout the continent. Nothing seems more European these days than the distrust and contempt expressed for the founding principles of the European project; one villager characterises the unseen bureaucrats as “slave drivers and perverts”. (It’s a bitter irony that the village itself is already clearly multilingual and multiethnic, with Hungarians, Germans and Romanians united only by their hatred of gypsies and now the Sri Lankans.) As the dislike of the recent immigrants is funnelled into a Facebook page and transformed into violence, a village meeting is held, and in a single unbroken take, the ugliest nationalistic populism – or fascism, as it used to be called – is on display. The prejudice isn’t confined to the uneducated: the village bore who’ll happily speak French at the dinner table pontificates on cultural difference to gild his bigotry, and the local GP spouts about foreign pathologies spreading disease. A lot of this is funny, but it’s the kind of laughter that hurts. Matthias, meanwhile, is barely listening, much more concerned with holding Csilla’s hand, more like a child with his mother than the macho man he projects to his son.

In the final act, R.M.N. takes a left turn. Mungiu maintains his naturalistic style, but characters begin to act in unexplained ways; bears turn up and death seeps in. The surreal turn isn’t some visionary, cathartic release but more a surrender to the situation’s absurdity. Earlier in the film, we’re shown a village ritual where men from the valley and men from the hills hit each other with sticks ‘to drive away bad omens’. It doesn’t make much sense, but sense left this place long ago.