Shot entirely on an iPhone 15, Radu Jude’s “Kontinental ’25” is a modern fable about one woman’s moral spiral in an interconnected world. It begins when government bailiff Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) evicts a homeless man from the basement in which he’s squatting, resulting in his suicide. Although Orsolya didn’t tie the noose, she feels responsible and searches for absolution by any means necessary. Through droll, static direction and political caricature, Jude constructs a typically acerbic social satire and his most character-focused work to date.
We meet the elderly Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) during his daily routine of begging and collecting scrap in the streets of Cluj, Transylvania, before retiring to his dingy boiler room squat. The building is set to be converted into a luxury hotel by the French chain Kontinental, requiring his removal by Orsolya, who, after numerous warnings, finally gives Ion 20 minutes to pack his belongings and leave. Instead, the former athlete turned panhandler hangs himself from a radiator as Orsolya drinks coffee outside.
Her remorse fuels the bleakly comic saga that follows. The incident quickly becomes a viral sensation; as a Hungarian immigrant, she finds herself the topic of online scandal and a target of Romanian nationalists, leading to a stint of self-isolation as her husband and children depart for a vacation in Greece. More reflective than laugh-out-loud hilarious, “Kontinental ’25” is devoid of the juvenile humor of Jude’s previous films, especially zanier fare like the sprawling labor parody “ Dracula ” and the gig economy spoof “ Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World .” Perhaps this is a sign of artistic maturity, as well as what appears to be searing anger at a cruel society whose rules and regulations drive a poor man to his death. In Jude’s hands, the iPhone is a funhouse mirror for our worst impulses. With little emotional recourse, Orsolya ends up having repetitive conversations about the incident with anyone who’ll listen: friends, co-workers, her mother, even a former student from her time as a law teacher. (Her verbiage is the same each time, becoming increasingly rehearsed and repetitive, making the 109-minute runtime feel longer.) Although each of her acquaintances and loved ones are happy to lay the blame for Ion’s death at someone else’s feet, Orsolya can’t shake her festering guilt. In the end, none of her chosen coping mechanisms — donating to nongovernmental organizations, religious confession, an illicit affair — can bring Ion back, or, more importantly to Orsolya, make her look like a better person. Taking his cues from Roberto Rossellini’s “Europa ’51,” Jude crafts a similar story of a woman steeped in remorse. But where Rossellini’s protagonist (a grieving mother played by Ingrid Bergman) turns to humanitarianism, Orsolya’s stiff moral architecture doesn’t allow her to become truly altruistic, no matter how desperate she may be. Instead, Jude turns his sights on the literal architecture of Cluj to illustrate his story’s ethical contours. Establishing shots of the evolving Romanian city frame it as a place of development, tourism and people left behind by these market forces, making the intrusion of a new Kontinental hotel (and thus Ion’s eviction, and perhaps even his suicide) all but inevitable.
The dilemma of where Orsolya fits into this equation — as either a willing actor or a helpless cog in a cruel machine, someone just following the rules — becomes the heart of her existential crisis. It’s the banality of evil filtered through the kind of unremarkable story one might glance over in a newspaper or on a constantly refreshing social media feed. As stories of war and fascism leak in through the film’s peripheries — verbal anecdotes about Gaza, viral videos about Ukraine and TV news items about Viktor Orbán — Orsolya’s crisis of conscience pales in comparison to these greater woes. And yet, her crumbling self-image only grows in importance, becoming central to her purview as someone with access to the internet, and to other people’s opinions. In Jude’s hands, the iPhone is a funhouse mirror for our worst impulses, often revealed in the most workaday scenarios. Few filmmakers have such a keen sense for how our world of constant connection and feedback desensitizes and breeds narcissism, resulting in our having the same conversations, over and over, in the vain hope of new insight. In other words, insanity.
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