‘Kontinental ’25’ review: Radu Jude returns after winning the Golden Bear

Dir. Radu Jude. Romania 2025. 109mins

Romania’s Radu Jude is one of those rare film-makers for whom the phrase “expect the unexpected” might actually mean something. It certainly applies to his Berlinale competition entry Kontinental ’75, as this story of a guilt-ridden bailiff ostensibly resembles conventional social realism but then broadens its scope fascinatingly, foregrounding satirical intent and a mischievous degree of verbal overload.

Will more than satisfy Jude fans 

While not as formally playful as his last fiction feature Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World or 2021 Berlin Golden Bear winner Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn, Kontinental ’75 nevertheless shows Jude’s socio-political antennae characteristically a-twitch as he scans the contemporary mood of both Romania and (as the title suggests) Europe overall. Featuring a terrific central performance by Eszter Tompa, both comic and affecting, the film will more than satisfy Jude fans but also bring reassurance to anyone who was worrying that European art cinema had lost its combative spirit.

The setting is Cluj in Transylvania, one of Romania’s wealthier cities where a homeless elderly man, Ion Glanetasu (Gabriel Spahiu) salvages plastic bottles, approaches people at pavement cafes and generally rages at the world. Somewhat disrupting the effect of everyday normality are Glanetasu’s encounters with several giant model dinosaurs (actual attractions in a local Dinopark) and a wonderfully testy contretemps with a robot dog.

Glanetasu returns to an abandoned boiler room where he is currently crashing, but receives a visit from bailiff Orsulya Ionescu (Tompa), accompanied by gendarmes, who serve him notice to leave.Orsulya is actually more sympathetic than her role suggests, having pulled strings to allow Glanetasu to stay for longer. Even now that he is obliged to leave immediately, she allows him extra time to gather his belongings – meanwhile explaining to the gendarmes that a real estate firm plans to demolish the building and erect a boutique hotel, the titular Kontinental.

But Orsulya’s act of generosity has shocking consequences – and, as the film’s spotlight turns to her, she goes into an agonised tailspin. Although she is officially cleared of guilt, this sensitive, thoughtful woman can’t help musing on questions of personal responsibility and ethics, in which, as a former law teacher, she has a particular interest. Meanwhile, local press target her as a ‘Hungarian ethnic’ harassing innocent Romanians – such tensions, stemming from Transylvanian history, still apparently a sore point in the region.

Other people that Orsulya talks to reveal their own prejudices and intolerance: an official lets slip his antisemitic views; her friend Daria (Oana Mardare) confesses to conflicted revulsion towards homeless people; while Orsulya’s mother (Annamaria Biluska) rankles at her liberalism and angrily accuses her of catching “the Romanian always complaining virus’”. While her husband and children head off to a Greek holiday, Orsulya meets up with Fred (a very droll Adonis Tanta), her ex-student in Roman Law.

Kontinental ’75 is very much of a piece with the overall Jude project – of taking the socio-cultural temperature of his country and, beyond that, of 21st century European  capitalism. One surprise moment of ribaldry apart, it is neither as scabrous nor as encyclopedically scattershot as Do Not Expect…­  But it is one of his more discursively dense films, notably in the long-take discussion between Orsulya and Daria and in the later consultation with a suave but forbidding Orthodox priest (Serban Pavlu).

Meanwhile the geography of Cluj and environs has a strongly concrete presence, with Marius Panduru’s impressively polished iPhone cinematography offering a detailed mapping of the city both in its urbanely presentable glory, historic and touristic, and in the drab functionality of its more mundane corners.