Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Angela works as an assistant at a production company. Her job is to find people who have had accidents at work and record their testimony for the company's safety video. She drives through Bucharest traffic all day, does not sleep, and between jobs puts a filter on her phone to play a crude male character in short videos. The subject is not the exploitation of labour but how that exploitation gets recorded. The long scene at the end shows the safety video being shot: the injured man's statement is corrected over and over until the blame moves off the company and onto him. The form has two layers. The present-day material is black and white and handheld, cut against colour footage from a Romanian film of 1981. The heroine of that older film is also a driver and is also called Angela. Two Angelas working the same streets forty years apart carry the entire argument. Radu Jude directs. It runs close to three hours and won the Special Jury Prize at Locarno in 2023. Ilinca Manolache plays Angela and Nina Hoss the company's Austrian executive. Who it is for: viewers who like formally daring, angry, long films. Who it is not for: anyone with limited patience; the narrative is deliberately punishing and the final scene runs close to thirty minutes in a single shot.