Mercenaries' Trap

The film rests on something that happened in Transylvania at the end of the First World War. At the close of 1918 authority in the region passes from Austria-Hungary to Romania. A nobleman who owns land there comes home to find part of his property burned. He decides the peasants of a neighbouring village are to blame and orders them killed. An officer from the Romanian volunteer corps of Transylvania stands with the villagers. The film builds the events as a story of revenge. The account looks from the nationalist frame of its period, and that frame is the film’s own. The hundred and nine minutes are compressed into a short span. Gheorghe Cozorici and Mircea Albulescu appear in Sergiu Nicolaescu’s Romanian film, completed in 1982.