If you’re sick of trailers that play the film’s hand too soon, iconoclast Radu Jude is going in a different direction. The official trailer for the Romanian satirist’s latest film, Kontinental ’25, doesn’t give anything away. It tells us almost nothing about the plot at all, in fact. But in not telling us, it does convey that the Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The Worldfilmmaker is confident enough to let his speak for itself when it actually premieres. That’s about as exciting as a trailer can get.
That’s not to say there’s nothing going on in today’s clip—far from it. The 45-second trailer features audio of the film’s protagonist Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) reciting the Lord’s Prayer, overlaid with intriguing discordant imagery. There’s a shot of Orsolya at some sort of robot dinosaur park, one of a man with a trashbag on a chairlift, and a phone screen showing Deadpool nerfing the camera.
The film’s synopsis is almost as vague: “Orsolya is a bailiff in Cluj, the main city in Transylvania. One day she must evict a homeless man who lives in the basement of a building. An unexpected event creates a moral crisis she tries to solve as best she can.”
Kontinental ’25, which a press release describes as a “twisted take” on Italian filmmaker Robert Rosellini’s Europe ’51, premieres tomorrow at Berlinale. “When we question our own reactions to tragedies, we often find them on the verge of ridicule,” Jude told Varietyahead of the film’s premiere. “I’m not judging—I do it too—but I find that there’s a comedic, almost Balzacian ‘human comedy’ in these contradictions. It’s less a satire and more a reflection of the absurdity and complexity of human reactions.”
