Dogs

Roman comes out to a desolate stretch of country near the Ukrainian border to look at the land he has just inherited from his grandfather. His intention is straightforward: sell it and leave. Then the local policeman explains what sort of man his grandfather was here, and the men left behind have no intention of giving up either the land or the smuggling that runs across it. Bogdan Mirică's first film steps away from the familiar realism of Romanian cinema and builds a straight thriller: wide, empty, flat country with very few people in it. The violence is not shown, it simply waits in the next frame. The man Vlad Ivanov plays is the most unnerving presence in it. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes.