Viorel negotiates daily life in bleak wintertime Bucharest with dispassion and an obscure anger. But when it becomes apparent he is planning a shooting, his stale and predictable world gets recast in a new and mysterious light.
Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu destroys all notions of crime as entertainment in this painstakingly realistic anatomy of a murder, delivering a chilling character study of an ordinary person driven to kill. At the heart of Viorel’s discontent lie a failed marriage and his increasingly distant relationship with his two daughters. Playing Viorel himself, Puiu presents an intelligent, literate and penetrating reinvention of the traditional murder drama. Meanwhile, as in his acclaimed The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), black comedy creeps into unlikely places: Intending to clean and test his gun, Viorel instead weathers a crew of redecorators, a neighbouring dysfunctional family and the unannounced intrusion of his own mother and her new partner, a man Viorel despises. A onetime student of classic film noir, Puiu’s realist noir subtracts the romance and keeps the doom. The result is an unflinching and haunting investigation of what compels a person to commit the ultimate act. - Gustavus Kundahl, San Francisco International Film Festival