Radu Jude is an iconoclast and an internet troll, often at the same time. His filmography is certainly unique, and his sense of humor is so dark and so specifically his own that naming him alongside Romania’s other great auteurs, Cristi Puiu, or two-time Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu, feels almost categorically wrong. Those are somber, meticulous, realist filmmakers. Jude is something else entirely, more formally adventurous and more deliberately abrasive than nearly anyone working in international cinema right now. Which is what makes Kontinental ’25 such a surprising and genuinely moving experience. At least to me, he’s found the sweet spot.
I’ve seen a lot of Jude’s movies at this point. I don’t say this to brag. I say it because I understand the entry fee, and because I want to be clear that Kontinental ’25 is the one I’d hand to someone who’s never seen his work and say: start here. His earlier 2026 release Dracula had moments I found genuinely funny and damning in how it skewers the creative limitations of artificial intelligence, but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to a casual viewer for just how grotesque and graphic it can get at times. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a masterwork of provocation that elevated him to broader international audiences. But neither of them strikes the balance that Kontinental ’25 does between laugh-out-loud absurdism and something that genuinely gets under your skin and stays there politically and socially.
The film follows Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff working in Cluj, the main city in Transylvania. One day she’s assigned to evict a homeless man from a cellar, gives him a few minutes to collect his things, and returns to find he’s killed himself. What follows is Orsolya’s slow unraveling, a moral crisis as she tries to figure out what role she played, directly or indirectly, in his death. Jude won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at Berlin for this, and you can feel why in how precisely constructed the escalation is.
In classic Jude fashion, the characters Orsolya encounters during her spiral are eclectic and often very crass, delivering the kind of blunt, uncomfortable humor that makes his movies feel like no one else’s. What’s remarkable about Kontinental ’25, though, is how digestible it is regardless of cultural familiarity. It doesn’t require a working knowledge of Romanian housing policy or post-socialist economics to feel the weight of what it’s saying, even if both are embedded in every frame. I kept thinking of Parasite, and I do not say that lightly. Not in terms of style, but in that same quality of making something feel culturally specific and completely universal at the same time. The themes here, how the most vulnerable people in society are neglected and punished, how the people who facilitate that neglect learn to live with themselves, translate without friction.
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For someone who grew up thinking Transylvania was a cartoonish, fictional place where vampires sucked the blood of commoners, watching Jude examine its politics and social norms with this kind of unflinching specificity is genuinely disorienting in the best way. It’s probably my favorite of his films. This or Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which feel like two sides of the same coin: how everyday people try to make sense of a status quo that has no interest in protecting them, and what it costs to keep going anyway. Kontinental ’25 is the quieter, more disciplined version of that question. And it lands just as hard regardless.
Score: 7/10
Kontinental ’25 (2026)
- Cast: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța
- Director: Radu Jude
- Genre: Comedy, Drama
- Runtime: 109 minutes
- Rated: NR
- Release Date: March 27, 2026
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