“Kontinental ‘25” (2025) is Radu Jude’s latest film, one of two that he made in 2025, the second being “Dracula,” which I started but decided to ditch fairly early during the two hour fifty-minute run time despite my devotion to vampires. This film has a more reasonable length at one hour forty-nine minutes, but if it is interesting to you, see it on a big screen because it is a foreign film with a quotidian style. To best appreciate Jude’s film, it is best to be in a theater and forced to focus to appreciate his style and message because it is easy to be lulled into the story’s rhythm then miss the momentous message. Set in contemporary Transylvania, Romania, starting on October 3, 2025, Ion Glanetasu (Gabriel Spahiu) realizes that his routine will be interrupted, and his reaction derails Orsolya Ionescu (Eszter Tompa), the bailiff whoevicted him from the boiler room where he lives. How will she move on?
While someone is suffering, even if they ask for help with people around, it is easier to ignore until it is not and too late, then everyone cares. Jude shows Ion wandering the city engaged in a routine that only he knows the purpose of, but it often includes begging for money or a job. It is easier for the people around him who cannot meet his needs to ignore him. In a surreal moment, strangers upbraid him for shooing a robot dog bothering him as if he was being mean to a real dog. There is a casual, indifferent cruelty that may not even be read as such except with the benefit of hindsight. Anyone who knows his story becomes astonished at how he got there so when Orsolya spirals, the tension is how far will she go.
Bawdy, crass, low, irreverent notes often accompany Jude’s tragedies. Orsolya spends the remainder of “Kontinental ‘25” telling everyone of the incident and her guilt, which she intellectually understands is misplaced, but she cannot shake it. A government official quotes “Schindler’s List” (1993) before incorrectly ending with an anti-Semitic slur, which he uses as if it is the appropriate word, and no one raises an eyebrow. Her husband, Vlad (Adrian Sitaru), sympathizes but is surprised when it disrupts their plans and routines. Orsolya claims that she pushed through the distress because of him and the children, but she barely spends anytime with them and returns to the office instead, which shows that a woman colleague bears the brunt of abuse in the form of gendered insults, which Orsolya does not endure in her professional capacity, only her personal.
As “Kontinental ‘25” unfolds, the incident mildly reignites a long-term Romanian Hungarian divide with Orsolya realizing that she is cast as the evil Hungarian classist person abusing the Romanian impoverished hero, which no one in Romania cared about before. Her mother (Annamària Biluska) offers an opportunity for self-righteousness to her daughter in a brief respite as an elective Romanian. Is Orsolya traumatized because she feels guilt and witnessed something awful or because it disrupts an image that she had of herself? She only expresses concern about the legality of the court order the evening of the incident, not before when she was having coffee with the guys that she works with. Jude depicts guilt as math, and it can get dispensed if enough good deeds are done even when someone does something wrong, but it can be eliminated entirely if someone does not witness anything. Her husband and Romanian friend Dorina Taus (Oana Mardare), who also feels guilty over Orsolya as a reminder of conquering a minority, note that it is the witnessing and disruption to routine, which is wrong. Orsolya references a Bertolt Brecht reference that implies that doing nothing makes one innately guilty.
Orsolya feels zero guilt when she becomes reacquainted with Fred Vasilescu (Adonis Tanta), a former student, who initially seems bothersome, but she meets him at a bar in a cinema’s lobby with a visual reference to Roberto Rossellini’s “Europa ‘51” (1952), which Jude is paying homage to with “Kontinental ’25.” It is a classic case of midlife crisis and connecting with someone who sees her as she wants to see herself as a professor of Roman Law. He is the only person that she does not recite her trauma to though she references it. Fred has a ribald sense of humor, so she lightens up too. Prior to Fred’s entrance, roaming around the city is a depressing, absurd and somber affair, but his tour is enthusiastic, unbothered and foolish. His reaction to the world’s ills is to joke about them. His lightly profane style lifts her mood, and she finds it infectious. Is this the best way to live?
Orsolya’s last onscreen meeting is with Orthodox Father Serban (Serban Pavlu), which returns her to the same old script, but hearing a similar response with the veneer of religious justification for serving as the agentic state. His religious arguments do not include Matthew 25: 40-45, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.“ He says that she must believe in the forgiveness of sins, but they also agree that she committed no sin. It is the appearance of resolution and answering of questions, but it is also incomplete. It excuses much but solves nothing in a practical way. Faith without works is dead. They do not meet in church because it is getting renovated, but they meet in a park, which features an enormous display of the UNTOLD Festival, an electronic music festival. At least they are not at the Dino Park at the Wonderland resort, which is featured a couple of times throughout the film. It costs money to visit that resort so remember, “Kontinental ‘25” is just a movie. Random kitschy dinosaur displays do not just randomly appear in parks in Romania. It is a tourist attraction to commemorate the discovery of dinosaur bones starting in 1895 then 1978. The fabric of the city turns city and science into a surreal, realistic landscape with the serious business of real estate sobering it up.
In between scenes, Jude features montages of still shots of the exteriors of buildings around Cluj-Napoca. There is all this room, but no place for a man in a basement boiler room. “Kontinental ‘25” is a movie about individuals navigating a society and environment that they inherited from the extinct dinosaurs, exist within a world with an inadequate instruction manual, the law, and do not fully control. Ion chooses the one home guaranteed to be available to him but is that new home shown in that montage? Orsolya was supposed to visit him but does not. It asks the question of how serious people are when they bemoan homelessness while hating the homeless because of how uncomfortable the homeless make people feel. Do you have to be good to deserve a place to live, freedom of movement, food, water? The answer is no yet people always want to hear tales of how someone becomes homeless as if to rationalize that such a fate would never happen to them.
