Dispatches from AFI Fest 2025: Kontinental 25
By Joshua Silva, Edited by Izzy Balderrama
Both Lanthimos’ Bugonia and Radu Jude’s latest iPhone-shot film Kontinental 25 present two modes of existing at the end of history: if we are to make sense of a reality where the machinations of global capital seem too complex and integrated for any one person to change, we can either live as vainly charitable, complacent liberals — a personality represented by both films’ female leads — or plunge fully into the realm of schizoid conspiracy. The irony is that the latter group, though they often come to hateful conclusions, are far less apathetic to the chaos, their psychosis arguably a more rational response than liberal pragmatism. As Jiddu Krishnamurthi said, “it is no sign of health to be well-adjusted in a profoundly sick society.”
Jude’s satire reckons with the hypocrisy and apathy of “well-meaning” liberals. In Romania, the ethnically-Hungarian bailiff Orsolya undergoes a moral crisis after her eviction of a homeless man (who appears to be the main character for the film’s first 20 minutes) leads him to commit suicide by metal wire. She spends the rest of the film seeking counsel among her husband, friends, and even the Church, but finds only easy absolution and indifference to the homeless man’s suffering.
The strongest of these vignettes, and one of the best scenes of any movie this year, is the film’s centerpiece: an at-least 10 minute scene on a park bench (played mostly in one continuous shot), where Orsolya and her friend lay bare their liberal guilt. Her friend uneasily reassures herself of her moral fortitude by sending two euros per month through her phone carrier to various charitable causes (Ukraine and Gaza rattled off among other crises as if all global horror is interchangeable), like some kind of social justice investment portfolio. In a western world that can no longer deny its complicity in suffering, charity becomes a pressure–release valve for absolving guilt. Orsolya does not want to succumb to apathy, but isn’t it easy when, after all, we have to look after ourselves first and foremost? And how much can we really do to prevent the mass suffering that occurs every day?
Jude bookends Orsolya’s self-flagellating journey with a reminder that this world is indifferent to her as well: we aren’t introduced to her until about 20 minutes into the film, and she ends the film absent from a montage of the city streets. Jude reminds us that her paralyzing guilt is a result of the same individualism that characterizes the Romanian nationalism which Orsolya finds herself a victim of (in a scene where she’s framed as a foreigner by right-wing media, leading to dozens of anti-Hungarian comments). We see the process by which the homeless man is turned from a human into an externalizing of Orsolya’s own narcissistic conflict. How can Orsolya help the homeless when she only sees them — along with all the suffering the world — as an extension of her own failures?
Though it sometimes spins its wheels, Kontinental 25’s parade of indifference towards suffering combined with Jude’s eye for the absurdity of modern commercialized life (pissing in a Bitcoin ATM, kicking a robot dog, etc.) captures the stagnant despair of modern western life more accurately than most contemporary films.