RMN, review: lust, xenophobia and rage in rural Romania

The director Cristian Mungiu returns to Cannes with another Palme contender, heavy on atmosphere and grit, if not political subtlety

The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu shot to fame with his Palme d’Or-winning abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), a pitiless bulletin which prowled through its story in signature long takes, and caused an overhaul of the Academy’s voting system when it failed even to be nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

A regular back in Cannes ever since, Mungiu competes this year with RMN, a heavily pointed state-of-the-nation drama set in a Transylvanian village that’s home to a mixture of Romanians and Hungarians. His objective is to tease out parochial bigotry and hold it to the light: not only are ‘RMN’ the three consonants in “Romania”, but they also form the initialism in Mungiu’s language for “nuclear magnetic resonance”, as used in brain-scan procedures.

The tumour in the film’s sights is the attitude of rural Romania to a handful of immigrant workers, whose unwanted arrival proves a common cause uniting a bullish majority of the folks in town. The director based his script on a 2020 incident in the village of Ditrau, when a petition signed by 2,000 locals caused the removal of two Sri Lankans from a bread factory; the signees complained that low pay was making the jobs unattractive, but alongside that was the clear implication that they didn’t want the fingers of foreigners polluting their dough.

While all these tensions are still mounting, the factory’s HR manager Csilla (Judith State), a poised cellist who’s the model of an educated liberal, is fending off the stalkerish attentions of an old flame – who is, rather schematically, her opposite in every way. This is the part-Roma, part-German Matthias (bearish, inscrutable Marin Grigore), who has just returned to the village after getting the sack from a job in Germany.

Matthias has a wife and young son with him, but he pines for Csilla, scratching at her back door (and worse) like a mongrel. His methods of child-rearing are beneath contempt, trying to toughen up his meek son by sending him off alone into woods that are known bear-haunts, and he doesn’t endear himself any further to us when he threatens to kill his wife if she tries to take the boy away. It’s hard to imagine in what past life Csilla thought this ogre was a catch.

But Matthias, RMN’s least articulate figure, is in a way the target of its metaphorical brain-scan: he shows his hidden fealties when an all-out war of words erupts in a town-hall meeting between massed xenophobes and the factory’s employees. This plays out in the film’s longest shot, a carefully rehearsed 17-minute slab of community theatre, with 26 speaking roles among dozens of other seated extras, as everyone’s nastiest prejudices are given a thorough airing.

The film’s craft, with its shivery wooded landscapes and deep focus, is consistently strong, and the acting – especially from State, but also many of the bickering village ensemble – spices up what might have been a route-one polemic. Mungiu’s script gives us a malicious firebombing by intruders with KKK masks, and at the exact moment you most expect one, which gives you some indication that this is his least subtle piece to date: a fuming rebuke to insular attitudes going back centuries. It has a closing gambit with which I’ll need to sit a while longer, but RMN certainly lands – and with blunt force.

125 min. Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A UK release is TBC