Critics reviews

The film, a masterpiece based on two nonfiction novels by former BBC reporter Tatiana Niculescu Bran, is not just of narrative interest, though it certainly is that; it is also a remarkable further demonstration of Mungiu’s cinematic vision.

For Mungiu, there are political and dramatic implications to the way that people and bodies occupy and interact within a frame... and the way onscreen and off-screen space are established. This is no less true in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days than in Beyond the Hills, and it depends fully on the use of the widescreen image. Mungiu's 2.35:1 aspect ratio does not serve the aims of epic grandeur but instead instantiates an existential claustrophobia that is terrifying and, finally, desperately sad.

If there is any conclusion offered at all, it may be that of the ultimate inscrutability of the human mind. Though the suffering of poverty and deprivation is undeniable, no simple explanation is provided for the deeply troubled characters in the film. An unfathomableness is the impression left by the film. With its muted colors, white snow, grey skies, desiccated grass, dark, heavy tapestries and furniture, it offers little compassion or optimism about the human condition.

Rather than the stuff of horror movies or a proof of Romania's refusal to leave behind the Middle Ages, exorcism is an extreme metaphor, illustrating what happens when fragments of religious charity are the only resort to help the helpless. While the actual narrative context is undeniably tied to Romania's recent history... the protagonists' plight is only an extreme version of situations that are increasingly familiar in virtually everyone's backyard...

...To its credit, Beyond the Hills takes the time to develop that 4-3-2 insisted on compressing. Instead of the state, orthodox religion is the Big Bad this time, which is not to say that the state is altogether absent. Given Mungiu's odd, simultaneous tendency for allegory and rank literalism, the cloistered convent life depicted in Beyond the Hills could be a representation of state ideology by other means. But more logically, we can take the title at face value.

Beyond the Hills is a much more complex and ambitious work than 4, 3, 2, championing love and questioning religion's attempt to appropriate it by labelling it divine. Most striking here is the restraint with which Mungiu handles what turns out to be a story of religious fanaticism, murder, demonic possession and repressed sexuality (which, according to a tiny mention in the end credits, is based on real events).

What makes the story tragic, instead of merely sad and sordid, is the way Mungiu shows the two realities, the secular and the Orthodox, colliding. The filmmaker does not sit in judgment of his characters.

If you can adjust to its long, observational takes, deliberately slow pace and refusal to answer normative plot questions about good and evil or crime and punishment, this new feature from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu will stick with you as one of the year's most powerful films.

Beyond the Hills is gorgeously austere and often exhilarating in its its slow-burning atmosphere of dread and sorrow.

At times the pace of "Beyond the Hills" is nerve-wrackingly slow. But Mungiu has his own way of creating suspense, and he has a gift for making a known outcome as shocking as a twist.

Beyond the Hills is a two-and-a-half-hour picture that takes some of the stylistic signposts described by Paul Schrader in his landmark study "Transcendental Style in Film" and uses them to tell a story in which precisely nothing is transcended, either in spite or because of the religious setting of the story. Which may be part of the point. In any event, what we're dealing with is not something considered entertaining in a conventional sense. It is, however, entirely gripping

It would be easy for Beyond the Hills to wag a shaming finger at the Orthodox Church for practices that will strike many as cruel, retrograde, and mired in superstition. But if anything, Mungiu affords the Church a grudging respect and reserves its anger for a society rife with institutional failure (a constant theme in the new Romanian cinema), leaving so many women with no place else to turn.