The Brooklyn Rail

It’s a misleading title, Kontinental ’25 (2025). It has to do with a faceless company that wants to build a hotel that is not the setting of the film. The hotel does not exist. It hasn’t been built yet and doesn’t even get built over the course of the film. It’s an unattainable ideal of capitalism, symbolic of an exclusive material goal we can’t see or touch, evocative of the idea that “Real estate developers rule Romania.”

I wrote about Dracula back in November, and, although Kontinental ’25 feels tonally opposite, Romanian director Radu Jude, with a cast of his regulars, is back to keep up the good fight against the fascist tendencies and capitalist system that make the world go round backward. His signature deadpan humor is both as biting as the T-Rex in the amusement park where our story begins, and, unlike his more absurd films (Dracula and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn), as subtle as the dull chomping of the dino’s plastic teeth.

The hotel, and the transient nature of its inmates, is an iconic cinematic locale, from Edmund Goulding’s 1932 Grand Hotel to Wes Anderson’s 2014 The Grand Budapest Hotel. In Kontinental ’25, we have the transience without the anchoring structure and juxtaposed with that, we find ourselves stuck in the circular thoughts of our guilty protagonist. Even the movie poster, featuring a vintage illustration style, is reminiscent of what might have been the handpainted poster for a Golden Age movie like Grand Hotel. One of the great hallmarks and joys of a Jude film is the clever and nuanced layering of history, both of Romania and of cinema.

So what does the invisible hotel have to do with the plot that is afoot? A municipal worker, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), must evict a homeless man (Gabriel Spahiu) from the boiler room of a building slated for demolition to make way for a new hotel. Orsolya and her army of gendarmes thoughtlessly bang on his locked door demanding that he “open up” because “we know you’re home.” While Orsolya and the gendarmes wait for the man to gather his things and get ready to go to a shelter, she ironically comments on her neighborhood: “It’s suffocating. I’d move out if I could.” Meanwhile, the man being forced out of his home commits suicide by self-strangulation. Jude’s dark and critical humor thrives on a diet of such fatal irony and the seemingly innocent ways in which words contradict actions and values.

Our guilt-ridden government employee cannot stop rehashing, in vivid detail foisted upon her hapless listeners, the events surrounding the death of the man. She refuses to join her husband and children on vacation in Greece, saying, “I want to be with myself.”

Except Orsolya’s not really alone with herself: she’s with a former law student (Adonis Tanța); her Hungarian mother; a priest; a nationalist collective divided by the weight of strained Hungarian–Romanian relations; the ideological systems that force her into a role that makes her completely uncomfortable with that self she is so desperate to be with.

The central conceit of the narrative is brilliantly and deceptively simple: Orsolya is racked with guilt but “Legally, I’m not guilty.” The entire film follows her through the liminal space between her emotions and the law. I’m reminded of Richard Brody’s New Yorker essay on Armageddon Time (2022) in which he described director James Gray’s style as “faux realism,” a phrase that feels appropriate for Kontinental ’25, even though Jude is a very different type of director than Gray. Here, Jude’s brand (or rather, anti-brand) of “faux realism” seems an absurd world apart from the satirical extravagance of his Dracula, yet the two films speak to each other as companion pieces—the best of backstabbing friends. Both operate in an obsessive rut that they are more interested in digging deeper than in getting out of. Instead of retelling Dracula stories for three hours, this much more concise film explores the futility of guilt with a deadpan humor appropriate for a universe, established in Dracula, of the living dead.

Deadpan can sometimes turn dry and coldly distant in this hyper-fixated film, but every beat is calculated to feed into the movie’s thoughtfulness and its ability to be thought-provoking. The camera often struggles to find the characters’ faces, even filming scenes, like Orsolya’s confession to a priest, from behind, removing the emotion of facial expression. Even in full view, the actors often compete with the noise and glare of a television in the background of important (or maybe not so important after all) conversations. That cool, critical eye of the camera can be off-putting for audiences, but it is cleverly intentional. I’ll also throw in here that Kontinental ’25 features a lengthy and wild monologue, and I am always captivated when a director so engrossingly distills the issues and, in this case, social hypocrisies of his movie into one more or less uninterrupted speech. Jude embraces the theatrical alongside a vibe of projector-screen-history-lesson in order to compensate for the low budgets of his films, and it makes him an indie master.

That’s not to say that his cinematography is not both enchanting and as playful as his dialogue. Gorgeous, poignant, or harsh shots of Cluj, a city in Transylvania, punctuate the story. The sense of transience, in terms of literal houselessness and of processing guilt, builds through the film’s ambling start along roadways, paths, bridges, alleys, steep steps, and narrow and confined passages.

Jude’s documentarian style makes me believe that the city shots are real and undoctored—some of them funny in a way that, if they weren’t real, would seem too absurdly on the nose. The text on one building, in particular, encapsulates the mood of the movie and our present-day world. So anyway, like the writing on the wall of that building, may you, “Enjoy Capitalism,” and this movie debuting at Film Forum this Friday, March 27.