Radu Jude turns guilt into farce and bureaucracy into tragedy; a moral trial conducted in real time, and one of the most exacting European films of recent years.
★★★★½
Shot on an iPhone while Jude was preparing Dracula, Kontinental ’25 began as an offhand project but has become his most direct and affecting work. It opens with Ion, a former athlete turned destitute, wandering the outskirts of Cluj collecting bottles and stomping through a park of animatronic dinosaurs. Valeriu Andriuță plays him with a worn, physical calm that anchors the film long after he has exited the narrative. When Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a Hungarian-Romanian bailiff, arrives to clear the site for a luxury hotel (the ‘Kontinental’ of the title), she gives him half an hour to pack his things, and he uses it to take his own life. The rest of the film follows her attempts to explain, excuse, and live with what happened.
This is a radical, cutting satire of guilt, self-justification and bureaucracy, filmed with a patience that borders on punishment. Jude keeps the camera still and lets conversations stretch until cracks start to appear in the façade of civility. Orsolya humblebrags about automatically donating a few euros each month to faraway causes (so convenient!). A former student, half drunk, fills the silence with Zen parables while Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca loops behind them. A priest reassures her that suicide is a sin that reflects badly on nobody but the hellbound victim, while batting away her more esoteric enquires. What begins as Orsolya’s repeated, workshopped confession slowly becomes a performance of self-flagellation, each exchange bending the truth a little further out of shape.
The social ground under this is unmistakable. Jude films in real corners of Cluj where old housing stock is being replaced by hotels and luxury developments. The story’s morality play grows out of the rubble of urban gentrification: an inconvenient man removed to make room for tourists. Bureaucratic compassion replaces solidarity; everyone tries to help at a distance, through approved mechanisms and trendy apps. The film shows how moral duty has been outsourced, and how the old socialist idea of collective care has thinned into gestures that cost little and change nothing.
Jude shot Kontinental ’25 himself, using an iPhone, a tripod and available light. The resulting twitchy autofocus and occasional overexposure are not mistakes but part of the film’s conscious visual texture, matching the nervous, overheard rhythm of Orsolya’s conversations. The cheap digital images belong to the same world as the online debates she scrolls through. It is the language of contemporary guilt, flat and overlit. The phone is not only the tool that records her world but the stage on which that world now performs its own morality, with every gesture shaped for an imagined witness. Perhaps filming this way while preparing for the scale of Dracula let Jude stay sharp, as if to test what happens when every technical safety net is removed. It feels like Jude testing whether he can make his point while hewing to a stylistic minimalism and a tight ascetic control; the opposite of the anarchic Bad Luck Banging or expansive Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World.
As Orsolya falls asleep one night, Detour plays on a television, its fatalism folding into her own self-justifying narration. While she humours her student’s half-remembered koens in a cinema bar, a poster for Europa ’51 hangs in the background like a ghost, pointing toward another woman’s breakdown under the weight of conscience. Posters for El Bruto and Kuhle Wampe flank the lobby, turning the space itself into a miniature archive of moral labour and social defeat. The whole lobby feels like a museum of lost political cinema, a place where the language of moral clarity has been reduced to décor. Each reference works less as citation than as echo, fragments of a moral cinema whose faith in redemption has worn thin. Even Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days slips in, a film about routine and grace repurposed here as background noise to a confession that never resolves, mainly driven by one character’s free-association on the subject of human shit (the mere reference to Perfect Days is more or less guaranteed a chuckle from any comfortable cinephile audience who will doubtless ‘feel seen’ – that weaponised narcissism is perhaps the larger point, though it may be missed amid the sound of people turning to their dates and whispering That’s a good one).
The tone of humour has shifted since Bad Luck Banging. The jokes are smaller now, often arriving through awkward silences or misplaced sincerity. They draw blood but never offer relief, as if laughter itself has become suspect. The dinosaur park, the ironic film posters, and the Perfect Days gag are all bitterly funny and pugnacious, a series of landmines that the film wanders onto.
Kontinental ’25 is a caustic parable about compassion on autopilot. a study of people desperate to prove their goodness while the institutions around them grind everything beneath their logic. Orsolya’s guilt expands outward until it mirrors the country itself: restless, overworked, permanently online, unsure what empathy means anymore. Her Hungarian ancestry turns her into a scapegoat, her private shame yoked to public hostility. Tompa meets this material with complete control, letting guilt register through pauses, glances, and the half-smile of someone either trying to pass for untroubled, or for troubled, or perhaps aiming for just the right level or style of regretful. She never overplays it, and that restraint keeps the film human when its ideas turn acidic. The result is a fearless and brilliant act of moral mock-confrontation, where studied confession becomes another form of denial.
The film behaves like a courtroom without verdict or absolution. Every conversation is a cross-examination, each listener another judge. The editing refuses closure; no scene ends when it should, and no speech leads to understanding. Jude watches guilt run through every system, legal, spiritual, digital, and finds no exit. It is a study of moral paralysis, showing how the habit of self-analysis can itself become a form of avoidance.
What’s left, once all systems of belief have emptied out, is the individual facing herself. Jude has moved on from focusing on collective injustice toward something closer to existential ethics, where guilt has no machinery to explain it away. The Church offers only platitudes, the State is a PR exercise, and the digital crowd judges noisily but to little effect. The film unfolds in that void, with Orsolya circling her failure as if it might yield meaning. Perhaps she stands in for Europe itself: educated, exhausted, self-critical, and convinced that self-awareness counts as change. In a moral landscape without God or ideology, the only remaining trial is the one she purports to conduct fruitlessly against herself.
Kontinental ’25 is powerful, challenging, and outrageously funny. This is Jude pared to the bone: bleakly comic, politically alert, and totally assured. It is a hard, lucid reckoning with how Europe rationalises its own failures, and how easily it moves on; it confirms Jude as one of the essential filmmakers of our time, and the great moralist of modern European cinema.
Kontinental ’25 played at the London Film Festival, ahead of a UK & Ireland cinema release on 31 October.
Whitlock&Pope 