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Emanuel’s humor and joie de vivre buoy him along, even as his suffering deepens, and his intellect and wit make farce out of his dire fate.

Mr. Jude wastes no time establishing that this won’t be an easy film to watch. Early on, he keeps the camera perfectly still while Emanuel, screaming, has a giant needle full of pus drained from an abscess. Nothing that follows is so graphic, but the film remains demanding and at times obscure.

The director, Radu Jude, unfolds the horrific treatment with an unflinching and fascinated specificity that contrasts with the teeming theatrical tableaux in which he films life in the lavish facility.

The warmest shot in the film comes just after Manu’s diagnosis, when he and his father, Lazar, sit outside near the seashore and express their awkward affection. This crucial scene allows us to invest in Manu’s medical outcome and worry about the fate he, his parents, and the rest of the infirm patients face as the horror of Nazism gathers strength. Scarred Hearts is a moving slice of life at its most essential.

Blecher, whose ontological musings are interpolated throughout the film via intertitles, has been referred to as the Kafka of Romania, and indeed, SCARRED HEARTS is imbued with a droll gallows humor that fans of absurdist directors like Roy Andersson or Ruben Östlund might appreciate.

Emmanuel's spirit never subsides even when his health continues to decline... "Live so that death may never take you by surprise," he says, quoting Marcus Aurelius with defiant passion. While Scarred Hearts willfully embraces these sentiments, it also respects the reality of extended suffering, and the profound affect it can have on an individual mind and the nation at large. The crushing last scene ends with a quote that also evokes the mission of Locarno in Los Angeles itself: "Be brave.

A moving adaptation of writer M. Blecher's semiautobiographical novel written about the latter's struggle with bone tuberculosis towards the end of his short life.

This fanatically detailed, intellectually furious drama, set in 1937, in a Romanian seaside sanitarium, catches a young Jewish writer in the jaws of disease and of Fascism... The director, Radu Jude, unfolds the horrific treatment, involving long needles, tight wraps, and a full-body cast, with an unflinching and fascinated specificity that contrasts with the teeming theatrical tableaux in which he films life in the lavish facility.

A double outsider – both disabled and Jewish – Manu is stuck with people he comes to like even as they simultaneously deny being anti-Semites and praise Hitler. It is a degenerating political world only apparently outside the sanatorium walls, underscoring the precarious balance that Jude manages to strike throughout this impressive achievement.

Despite its bleak theme, the film brims with anarchic life, and contains the festival's funniest sex scene, as two plaster-enclosed patients' attempt at coitus ends with our hero wheeled off screaming in agony. "Do drop by again!" calls out his inamorata. Marius Panduru's Academy-ratio photography, each scene staged in mainly fixed tableaux, makes the film as memorable formally as it is dramatically.

A work of stunning maturity that uses the by now classic trappings of the Romanian New Wave to startling, distancing effect, it captures the sense of a world on the verge of ending through the life-affirming struggles of the young men and women stuck inside a decaying hospital, powerless to stop either their own decay or the world's. Scarred Hearts carries the apocalyptic whiff of Fellini's And the Ship Sails On or Visconti's Death in Venice.

Because of its vignette-based structure, the film never coalesces into a single, engaging narrative, but it's rich with wonderful moments, from the slapstick of Emanuel's attempts to have sex in a hospital bed to the chaotic sequence in which the entire ward gets drunk together.