125 min | NR | April 28, 2023 | IFC Films
A bakery in a Transylvanian village hires two foreign workers, and the town decides their bread is now contaminated. Cristian Mungiu watches a community talk itself into hatred one polite objection at a time. The title means MRI, and the diagnosis is exactly that grim.
Matthias returns to his multiethnic Transylvanian village after walking off a job in Germany. He finds his hometown the same as he left it, full of grievance and waiting for something to blame. The local bakery hires two Sri Lankan workers because no local will take the wages. The village decides that foreigners touching its bread is a threat to everything it imagines itself to be. Cristian Mungiu builds the film around a slow accumulation of small resentments and shows how a community talks itself into cruelty one reasonable-sounding objection at a time.
Marin Grigore plays Matthias as a man who solves every problem with his fists and understands none of them. He wants to toughen up his mute son and reclaim his old lover and cannot do either. Judith State plays Csilla, the bakery manager who hired the workers and now stands alone defending them. She plays the cello in her apartment and absorbs the town’s hostility with a composure that costs her visibly. Macrina Bârlădeanu plays Ana, the wife Matthias keeps abandoning, with a quiet that reads as exhaustion rather than weakness.
Mungiu writes and directs with the patience of a man who refuses to flatter his audience. The centerpiece is a town-hall meeting staged as a single static seventeen-minute take. The camera holds wide on the community center while dozens of villagers air their fears, their prejudice, and their economic anxiety in three languages. Mungiu does not cut away to reaction shots or guide the eye toward a villain. He lets the bigotry arrive in the voices of ordinary people who believe they are being fair.
R.M.N. is the abbreviation Romanians use for an MRI scan, and the title names exactly what Mungiu performs. He cuts into a body and photographs the disease underneath the skin. The film resists the comfort of a clean ending because the rot it diagnoses has no clean ending. Mungiu trusts the slow build and the long take to do the work that lesser films hand to a speech. He shows you a place, lets it speak, and dares you to recognize it.