“I’d rather say it’s unfriendly to the audience to offer them what they already expect.”
FEATURE FILMOGRAPHY The Happiest Girl in the World / Cea mai fericită fată din lume (2009)
A Film for Friends / Film pentru prieteni (2011)
Everybody in Our Family / Toată lumea din familia noastră (2012) RABC Second Run (OOP) Aferim! (2015) RA Cinema Guild Scarred Hearts / Inimi cicatrizate (2016) RA Big World Pictures I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians / Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari (2018) RA Big World Pictures Uppercase Print / Tipografic majuscul (2020) RA Big World Pictures The Exit of the Trains / Ieșirea trenurilor din gară (2020) RA Big World Pictures Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn (2021) RA Magnolia Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World / Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii (2022) Eight Postcards from Utopia / Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală (2024) RA Big World Pictures Kontinental ‘25 (2025) Dracula (2025) RA 1-2 Special Diary of a Chambermaid / Journal d’une femme de chambre (2026)
In my opinion the most exciting 1970s-born filmmaker we have today. I was already onboard with him as a director when I discovered him somewhere between Aferim and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, was thrilled when he won the Golden Bear and then had my life changed when I saw Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, my choice for the best film of the 2020s. He genuinely excites me more than so many other directors working at the moment.
I wanted to maximize my odds of liking the next Jude film I tried after misfiring the first time, so I figured his mashup of Everything is Terrible and YouTube commercial compilations Eight Postcards From Utopia would be more in my wheelhouse and it was. The idea, as much as there is one here, is amusing: show how capitalism and consumerism marketed themselves to a new audience solely via clips from Romanian TV commercials post-communism (minus one extended excerpt of a commercial “actor” blowing his delivery, which feels like an error given it’s the only detour of its kind). The first fifteen minutes or so of this are the strongest, with peeks at how Romania saw itself and how companies exploited that.
I wrote down a few truly excellent advertising slogans btw:
“No Pepsi, no work. No work, no Pepsi.”
“Good stuff stays good, even through the bad times.”
And my fave, a cell phone provider who tells its viewers “First you earned the right to speak free. Now you can speak for free.” Legit hilarious!
I jotted down a few other favorite ads to remind myself for this write up:
+ A dad who grimaces when his son asks for milk, as the family fridge is now packed so full with food that it’s hard to get it something specific out. Brilliant visualization of idealized consumer heaven, props to that ad man in particular
+ A newspaper running hidden footage of an actual politician badmouthing their paper as an advertisement for their paper. There are a lot of newspaper ads here, actually, and all for different ones as I recall
+ A PSA on not being an asshole that admits “Maybe we’ll never be Germans” but we can still be nicer to each other
+ A mafioso and his crew doing a spot check of the snacks brought to school by scared students, smashing and wrecking them since they don’t have as much calcium as milk
+ A cafe owner who asks a musician to serenade his large dying pig as it lays outside his restaurant
+ The probing question for would-be contest winners: “Are you a Tits Expert?”
+ A disturbing living Christmas tree with a full mouth of human teeth
+ And an appeal to citizens to buy shares in Dracula Park
All that said, even at 73 minutes this feels thinly stretched, and part seven and the epilogue are basically dicking around to get this to feature length. I was struck by how many ads (even if they are of course selectively chosen for inclusion here) addressed politics with a bold specificity you’ll never find in the states, but the political aspects and messaging get a little cloudy as the film progresses and it starts to feel a bit more YouTube-y. Which is fun, to be sure, but it feels like there was potential here to do more with these fascinating cultural artifacts than just score some cheap jokes and induce moderate amusement
