Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World: Seriously Funny, Timely Romanian Journey into Night

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

Appropriately for a film about undignified labour, viewers will have to do some work to appreciate the rewards in Romanian writer-director’s Radu Jude’s Do No Expect Too Much From the End of the World.

But expect good things: Running a digressive two hours and 43 minutes, this idea-filled absurdist comedy, presented in the fragmented visual language of social media, ties together economic inequities of the European Union, political corruption and the exploitative labour practices of foreign film productions. Also, it’s seriously funny.

Ilinca Manolach in her Uber-office in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

The film justifies its 162-minute running time with some bold stylistic shifts between its loose “chapters,” and sulphurous satire, provided by our guide to this world, a thirty-something, exhausted but over-amped production assistant and Uber driver named Angela (Ilinca Manolache).

Shot mostly in high-contrast black-and-white, the film begins with Angela waking naked in her bed at 5:30 a.m., surrounded by empty bottles and a paperback of Proust. Hastily dressing in a sequined mini-dress that looks like it was worn to the club last night, she hits the road. And for much of the next two hours, the viewer is placed in the passenger seat next to her, in profile, her blonde hair tied back, as she scowls and drives through the traffic of Bucharest.

We follow her travels through a long day and night, blasting loud music to stay awake, cursing other drivers and responding frequently to the Ode to Joy ringtone on her phone.

The phone is where Angela turns from production gofer to auteur and content provider, creating a series of gaudy TikTok videos in colour, using an unstable filter that makes her look like a bald, furry-browed man named Bobita (a character created by Manolach during COVID who is a caricature of misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, arrested in Romania in 2022 on charges of rape and human trafficking). Bobita’s hair-curling rants serve to help Angela expel some of the toxicity she absorbs in real life.

Back in the real world, her day is spent visiting prospective subjects for an Austrian workplace safety film. The lucky disabled person who is cast will get a princely 500 euros for their participation if they’re sufficiently appealing and avoid saying anything that might provoke a lawsuit from their former employers. There’s also a brief ride with her mother, a visit to a city official about a plan to move her grandparents’ grave to make way for a new hotel, and detours for fast food, naps and a quick sexual tryst with an older lover.

During an errand to a film set to pick up some lenses from another production, the screen turns to colour again, when she meets the pugnacious German genre director, Uwe Boll. (Yes, that Uwe Boll, famous for video game movies and for beating up film critics in boxing matches). Boll is directing a giant bug movie, involving lots of gunmen running around in circles in front of a green screen.

There’s a third layer to the film, beyond Angela’s journey’s and TikTok videos. The opening credits describe the film as involved in “a dialogue” with the 1981 film Angela Moves On, a quasi-feminist drama directed by Lucian Bratu, starring Dorina Lazar as a Bucharest taxi driver, looking for romance and parking spaces in the days of Nicolae Ceaucescu’s dictatorship.

Scenes from the older film are intercut with the contemporary film, and the two fictional worlds converge when one of Angela’s visits takes her to the home of the older Angela, who’s playing a long-retired taxi driver now in her eighties.

One night, back in the black-and-white world, Angela does an airport run to pick up the soigné Austrian executive (Nina Hoss) who is in charge of the film project. At this point, we’ve already met this executive. She’d previously arrived in person, looming God-like on a large screen in the Romanian film company’s boardroom, where the director and local crew at a boardroom table below her groveled and flattered her in order to secure the contract.

The executive’s name is Doris Goethe, purportedly a descendant of the author, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, a not-so-subtle allusion to the Faustian bargain of selling your soul for foreign film production money.  

In a long conversation in English, Doris, seated in the back seat, wonders about the aggressiveness of Romanian drivers. Angela tells her about a notoriously dangerous stretch of badly marked highway, where there are hundreds of crosses to mark fatalities. The film once again switches to colour, to a four-minute silent sequence showing more than 100 of the roadside crosses, ranging from the elegant to the home-made, placed by families of the dead.

That montage of memorials leads us to the film’s final chapter, a film shoot on an industrial site, with the “winning” subject (Ovidiu Pîrsan) a man who was left disabled with a workplace injury at the site of his accident, posing along with his family while telling his story. The segment lasts around 40 minutes, shot without a cut in one unmoving camera position.

The scene is like watching slow surgery. In take after take, the film’s Romanian on-site director, and the Austrian executive Ms. Goethe watching remotely, alter the background and whittle the subject’s story to fit the Austrian corporate needs, until there’s nothing left of his experience except for the 500 Euro cheque.

The mordant title of the film comes from Polish-Jewish poet and aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909-1966). And it refers here, not to the literal destruction of the planet, but our numb acquiescence to the uncivil fragmentation and transactional demands of contemporary life.

Deeper, funnier and more despairing than Jude’s Berlin festival Golden Bear-winning 2021 political sex comedy, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World soaks up the agitated mood of the times and flips the bird to the dehumanizing gods of technology and the marketplace.

Do Not Expect Too Much from The End of the World. Written and directed by Radu Jude. Starring: Illinca Manolach. In theatres on April 19 and streaming exclusively on MUBI starting May 3.