The title of Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 indicates its debt to neorealism in general, and its borrowings from the plot of Europa ’51 more specifically. This initially seems incongruous, given Jude’s reputation as one of the more satirical, hyperbolic, and media-addled of contemporary filmmakers. But Kontinental ’25 is a neorealist film, one attuned to the everyday without fabricating the exceptional—it’s just that in the present day, the everyday is pretty exceptional (and quite frequently fabricated).[…]
Jude gets politically incorrect kicks when people reveal their fixations in conversation—but, more to the point, he presents a world full of such unreliable narrators that it is nigh impossible for his heroines to chart a moral course through all the noise.
— Mark Asch (Film Comment)
Synopsis: Orsolya is a bailiff in Cluj, the main city in Transylvania. One day she has to evict a homeless man from a cellar, an action with tragic consequences that triggers a moral crisis which Orsolya must weather as best she can.