R.M.N.

Cristian Mungiu's R.M.N. premiered in the main competition of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or. It marks the Romanian director's return to feature filmmaking five years after Graduation, and like that earlier work it continues his project of dissecting present-day Romania through the prism of a single, ethically vexed community. The title refers to a Romanian acronym for nuclear magnetic resonance, a brain scan: Mungiu has described the film as an attempt to detect what lies beneath the surface of a country, and a Europe, fraying at the edges.

The film is loosely based on the 2020 Ditrău xenophobic incident, in which villagers in a small Transylvanian town protested the hiring of Sri Lankan workers at a local bakery. Marin Grigore plays Matthias, a Romanian labourer who walks out of a German slaughterhouse and returns to his multi-ethnic mountain village; Judith State is Csilla, the bakery manager who hires the new workers. Tudor Vladimir Panduru's wintery widescreen images and Mungiu's signature long takes (one bravura town-hall meeting runs roughly seventeen minutes) hold the village in a single, unbroken gaze.

Critics greeted R.M.N. as one of Mungiu's strongest works, with Rotten Tomatoes recording a 96 per cent positive score and Metacritic registering universal acclaim. Sight & Sound, The Guardian and Cahiers du Cinéma placed it among the year's best, and the film won Best Film and Best Director at the 2023 Gopo Awards. It now stands among the canonical works of the Romanian New Wave's second decade, a portrait of communal anxiety made with chilling formal control.