Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Radu Jude / Romania, Luxembourg, France & Croatia / 2023 / 163 min
... but expect one of the wildest and most entertaining films of the year when Romanian iconoclast Radu Jude drums up a blistering social satire. A true speedball of a film that moves freely across forms and genres.
The world needs a film like Radu Jude’s crass, pitch-black and insanely entertaining satire – a radically unpredictable and almost genre-less film that grills all the sacred cows of our time with gasoline. Angela (a terrific Ilinca Manolache) is a young woman with a crappy job as a fixer for a company that makes campaign videos about workplace safety. But she’s also busy making her own provocative videos on Instagram, where she digitally disguises herself as a calloused macho dude who insults feminists, climate activists and everyone else. Over a really long day at work, she drives around Bucharest and meets an incredible cast of characters living in the shadow of the neoliberal world (dis)order. But just when you think you know where it is heading, the Romanian iconoclast grabs us by the nose with a true tour de force of a finale.