Five Must

May 26, 2023

Hot on the heels of 2021’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” Radu Jude — the bad boy of Romanian cinema, a title for which there is no small amount of competition — returns with an even funnier and more fearlessly confrontational satire about personal identity in the age of real-time digital capitalism. The beautifully titled “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” begins as a black-and-white profile about history’s most foul-mouthed casting agent as she drives around Bucharest auditioning severely disabled people to play victims in a corporate film about workplace safety (and this is also something of a film about workplace safety). In between stops, she uses a filter on her phone to record social media videos in character as a hyper-chauvinistic bald man who wants everyone to fuck him and/or die of rectal cancer.

Just when the film seems to be settling into the sweet spot between Abbas Kiarostami and Uwe Boll, the “Bloodrayne” director himself shows up, along with Nina Hoss (as Goethe’s grand-grand-granddaughter), an interstitial subplot styled to resemble a Romanian melodrama from 1981, references to everything from “Pimp My Ride” to Godard’s recent suicide, and the finest Zoom gags the cinema has yet to muster. And all of that comes well before this 163-minute tour de force splits in two with a twist that adds another layer of performance to a film in which everyone is siloed into their own realities, severing the fabric of a shared universe that’s incapable of being resewn together, let alone saved.