Beyond the Hills

Cristian Mungiu followed his Palme d'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days with Beyond the Hills (2012), which took the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes and a shared Best Actress award for its two leads. Based on real events at a Moldavian convent, it confirmed Mungiu as a central figure of the Romanian New Wave.

Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan play the two young women, one a nun and the other an outsider who cannot accept the cloistered life that has claimed her friend. The drama tightens slowly and steadily. Mungiu shoots in long, austere takes and natural light, and he refuses to demonise either the desperate visitor or the well-meaning religious community and its dogma. He withholds judgement as the situation darkens, and locates the trouble in incomprehension, with no villain to blame for it.

Critics admired its moral rigour and its refusal of melodrama, and read it as a study of faith, love and institutional failure. Demanding and harrowing, Beyond the Hills has the Romanian New Wave's commitment to patient observation and to difficulty left unresolved. Mungiu trusts the audience to sit with hard questions, and in a single friendship under strain he finds the fault lines of an entire society. His even-handedness toward the outsider and the devout community alike is what gives the film its terrible weight, and it remains a defining work of the movement's patient, unflinching realism.