Radu Jude turns the screws on a wry guilt trip in Kontinental '25

Jude’s familiarly static camera—the film’s no-budget iPhone set-ups are strategically placed around Cluj-Napoca to allow two characters to chat in the middle of the frame—allow the people in Kontinental ’25 to hang themselves with their own tone-deaf confessions, self-aggrandizing delusions, and weak-tea protests. As Olsolya talks with her family, her co-workers, her ex-student, and even her priest, the camera never flinches away from her wandering, self-centered quest for absolution. It also takes in the absurdities of present-day Romania—a local forest is filled with dinosaur animatronics—and the illusion-puncturing crassness of real life—death, sex, and racism all rudely interrupt Orsolya’s cloying self-soothing—with a similarly suppressed bewilderment. It’s a somewhat surprisingly soft touch, especially considering that the same crew put together Dracula, a flipside to Jude’s double-feature of Transylvania takedowns.

This tamped-down approach is less bombastic than Jude’s last few films, and less laugh-out-loud amusing, even for those who don’t fully jibe with his wicked and silly sense of humor. For those who chafe against it, the intentional repetition will surely become aggravating. But there are still sophisticated and dry punchlines to spare, and Kontinental ’25 boasts its greatest success in the atmosphere that its succession of encounters builds; its unrelenting focus on a pervasive and universal sensation that’s becoming stronger by the day—that the easiest, most natural thing we can do is sit and stare, paralyzed, at the mounting atrocities around us—scales the massive problems of economic inequality, senseless war, and rampant xenophobia down to a familiar level. Without making characters into symbolic representations of these sweeping issues, Jude allows unpleasantness to seep out from normal people, their worst qualities leaking into otherwise bland chatter.

When trying to stay abreast of the cascading atrocities, there’s no rest and no repentance for the well-intentioned gentrifier. The jabs at well-off neoliberals who know enough about systemic problems to pay lip service to them always connect, even as the script ironically provides glancing acknowledgements of global conflicts that most films shy away from. It’s all in service of an endearingly self-loathing film—how could it not be in a world filled with such cruelties? Solving these problems as a collective society, let alone as a complicated and corrupt nation, seems impossible. Successfully squaring one’s life with them on an individual level, without becoming a bloviating hypocrite, seems as absurd as Kontinental ’25.

Director: Radu Jude
Writer: Radu Jude
Starring: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța, Oana Mardare, Șerban Pavlu
Release Date: March 27, 2026