"Beyond the Hills" (2013)

Director Cristian Mungui's deal with people working within larger structures and finding themselves overwhelmed. Of course, the people don't see their circumstances as being the product of forces beyond their control. It's well-intentioned people trying to do the right thing, only for the right thing to become a more complicated and difficult task than initially imagined. The structure is Nicolae Ceausecu's former dictatorship in Romania and the corruption and infrastructural shortcomings that caused people to be limited in there options. Beyond the Hills is a story dealing with exorcism, but it looks almost nothing like any exorcism ever told. It's not a horror film, but a sparse, austere neo-realist narrative based on a real life incident. The film is set at a remote monastery, where a young nun (Cosmina Stratan) invites her lonely childhood friend (Christina Flutur) to briefly stay, only for her friend's personal demons and illnesses to disrupt the modest way of life of the church. The woman is likely suffering from schizophrenia or some similar mental health illness but the near-by hospital is underfunded and can't keep her, and she has no one else to take her in, having grown up in an orphanage and foster care. She's asked to stay at the church until she recovers, much to the displeasure of the nuns and the doggedly conservative priest who runs the place. It's not really a question of whether things will go wrong but when they will go wrong, and they do in horrifying and unsettling ways. Mungui's superb 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days carries the weird honor of being the only film to nearly make me hyperventilate. He sets his eyes on tragic subject matter and tells it in long, unbroken takes that make what already feels unnervingly real all the more vital and palpable. While Hills is deliberately paced, Mungui sets about observing the daily beats of monastery life and how the orthodoxy has colored every aspect of the lives of those individuals who live there. Everyone means well, but this was possibly the worst place the young woman could have gone for recovery, and yet sadly it was the only place she could have gone, making it all the more moving and harrowing.

Grade: ★★★★