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Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) was emblematic in the late nineties as a European auteur product rallying against the evils of homogeneous Hollywood style film making... With Aurora Puiu has replaced Haneke’s self-conscious game playing with a genuine revolutionary cinema of ideas that scrutinises the very foundations of representation and realism that form the fabric of the art form.

There is much information that Puiu withholds or hides in order to confront the viewer solely with an obsessive, extremely detailed study of Viorel’s movements (and immobility). Stylistically, Aurora resembles many other films of the Romanian New Wave; for most of its running time, however, Puiu’s exercise seems almost a parody of a Jean-Pierre Melville noir that demystifies the hero and strips him of his aura, in order to immerse him in tawdry, everyday reality.

The extraordinarily powerful ending of Puiu’s third feature Aurora (2010) brings a challengingly quotidian film to a painfully unresolved and darkly absurd conclusion. Like several other works from the so-called Romanian New Wave, such as Police, Adjective(2009), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and Puiu’s own The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), the narrative unfolds here from such an appreciably limited perspective that the meaning of its steadily accumulated details is not always clear.

There have been suggestions that Aurora is a black comedy, but even the gallows variety of humour that characterised Mr Lazarescu is entirely absent, the better to convey the asphyxiating effect of violence on Viorel and his world.

Puiu has not only produced a film that is, in vernacular terms, both long and slow. It grinds on with a kind of militancy against narrative meaning, while at the same time functioning enough like a work of cinema based in conventional narrative that it never tips over into the realm of the avant-garde. Plus, Puiu’s filmmaking simply isn’t lush or visually complex enough to edge it across that Michael Snow-Andy Warhol dividing line. As pure filmmaking, a great deal of it is functional at best.