Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. bakes a quiet tension into its parable of contemporary rural Romanian life at a crossroads. In a symbolic gesture that will take two hours to reveal its complementary function, a young boy, Rudi (Mark Edward Blenyesi), walks through the woods beyond his home in a small Transylvanian village only to backtrack in terror after catching sight of something that’s left pointedly off screen. In this moment, Mungiu sows the seed of expectation that social order in this corner of Romania is soon to be upended.
This opening scene is distinguished by that seemingly paradoxical mix of the assertive and evasive that’s distinctive to the cinema of the Romanian New Wave. The film doesn’t end with the gut punch that Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days does, nor does it burrow into its characters’ psyches with the same granular precision, but that’s almost by design. After all, R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time.
Perhaps too content. After the film’s opening credits, we’re introduced to Rudi’s father, Matthias (Marin Grigore), at a slaughterhouse. Matthias is taking a call that he claims to be an emergency, and after his superior calls him a “fucking lazy gypsy,” Matthias head-butts the man with a jolting suddenness and force. Later, we’ll glimpse Matthias near the backdoor of his ex-girlfriend Csilla’s (Judith State) home, masturbating as she strums her cello inside. That she’s practicing Umebayashi Shigeru’s “Yumeji’s Theme” is almost comically evocative of Mungiu’s intentions throughout, as this is a film that’s in the mood for dread.
When operating in such a suggestive fashion, R.M.N. is at once at its most effective and maddening. Matthias has returned to his hometown after a brief stint in Germany, and across shards of quietly detailed incident, we piece together what brought him to this point. The film strongly suggests that Matthias’s past relationship to Csilla, who’s been divorced for two years, broke up his marriage to Ana (Macrina Barladeanu), who cares for their mysteriously mute son in the home that they used to share. That and Matthias’s perpetual need to reassert his patriarchal authority, which reduces the character to a powder keg waiting to explode.
R.M.N. is a film almost perversely pregnant with sinister possibility, in ways that recall the work of Michael Haneke, but it also reveals an unforgiving cynicism about the world as its social-realist strains become increasingly apparent. The film’s conclusion is based on a pattern of details cannily planted throughout, from the presence that may or may not be terrorizing people in the woods outside the Transylvanian village to Matthias’s refusal of a job at the commercial bakery that Csilla manages. But then Mungiu tips his hand and it’s difficult to shake that his eye and ear for the minutiae of life is in service of shooting fish in a barrel.
If, in Beyond the Hills, an Orthodox monastery is symbolic of the fascist regime that invaded a country’s psyche, the local church in this film functions as a metaphor for collective irrationality. When the two Sri Lankan migrant workers, Alick (Gihan Edirisinghe) and Mahinda (Amitha Jayasinghe), who were recently hired by Csilla attempt to go to a service, the moment triggers nativist anxieties among the church’s flock. First the townsfolk refuse to buy bread from the bakery, claiming that the men took away jobs from locals and that they have a “different virus pathology,” and the provocations escalate from there.
The film’s tour de force is a 15-minute-plus long take set inside the town’s cultural center, into which the townsfolk spill because the church doesn’t give their hate enough room to breathe. It’s a marvel of creative harmony, even if it’s absent the dark humor that leavens the serious in Mungiu’s prior laments about how it feels to live under patriarchal oppression. As character after character hocks nativist talking points, the film succumbs to condescension.
Tensions explode but, thanks to an allegorical confrontation, they don’t yield the violence that one expects from more than just Matthias’s behavior. There’s one casualty, yes, but it’s born, believably, of impotence—of a certain inability or unwillingness to see that which is hidden in plain sight. And while the film’s ending may corroborate that Mungiu understands the bugaboos of the chattering class, namely how they form when people are confronted by the unknown, its obviousness is as inarguable as it is unredeemed by its silliness.
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