Young Rudi (Mark Edward Blenyesi) has fallen silent after witnessing something terrifying in the woods on his way home from school.  His father, Matthias (Marin Grigore), returns to the small Romanian village, but tensions are high between his estranged wife, Ana (Macrina Barladeanu), and his mistress, Csilla (Judith State).  Csilla finds herself in a fraught period as one of the senior managers at the local bread factory when she and the owner, Dénes (Orsolya Moldován), have brought on three Sri Lankan workers to get through the holiday rush as none of the locals would accept the work at the wages they offered.  Meanwhile, Papa Otto (Andrei Finti) faces a terminal diagnosis on his MRI, and Ben (Victor Benderra), an ecologist from France, has been sent to count the local bear population. 

Romanian writer/director Cristian Mungiu returned to the 2022 edition of Cannes with R.M.N., an interwoven drama taking place in a small, unnamed village over the Christmas and 2019-2020 New Year’s celebrations.  It was nominated for the Palme d’Or, and though that award was given to a different contemporary provocateur, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022), R.M.N. did go on to be picked up by IFC Films for distribution in the States. The film takes its name from the Romanian acronym for nuclear magnetic resonance, the principles of which are the basis of MRI technology.  R.M.N., though, spends surprisingly little time in hospitals and instead is Mungiu’s response and reckoning with the 2020 Ditrău xenophobic incident in which three Sri Lankan workers were brought in to work at a bakery and driven out of the town by the irate populus. 

Mingiu’s film opens with Matthias returning home early from his contract at a German slaughterhouse after physically retaliating against one of the local workers who referred to him as a “gypsy.”  Already, the town is abuzz about Rudi having gone silent from the shock of witnessing some unspoken horror in the woods.  For much of Matthias and Rudi’s shared time together across the 127-minute exploration of intolerance, Mingiu uses it as an opportunity to examine what it means to be a man.  A man must know how to survive in the wild, Matthias instructs.  He must not be afraid.  And he must always be armed when confronting a wild animal.  While Matthias is a devout follower of his own rules which all seem to border on paranoia and violence, it is notable that though his work is sure to contribute back home, he is absent from Rudi’s life for long stretches at a time and now that he is home, the few moments of freedom he has he opts to spend seeking out Csilla.  He is quick to object to how Ana is raising their son, especially in the wake of this development that has rendered the boy mute, and he is not quiet in his ideas about how she is enabling this behavior by letting Rudi sleep with her, accompanying him to school, and teaching him how to crochet as a form of calming therapy.  Matthias steps up in his own gruff way, but Rudi seems unenthused about his hyper-masculine approach to parenting. 

The major plot of the film revolves around the three Sri Lankan workers – Mahinda (Amitha Jayasinghe), Alick (Gihan Edirisinghe), and Rauff (Nuwan Karunarathna) – and the incredible, immediate, and total rejection of their existence by the townspeople who have just recently seemed to grow in their acceptance of the increasing number of Hungarian people who now call the town home.  While this plot is lifted from the Ditrău headlines, it is shocking and upsetting how this story can so easily be applied to tensions that are bubbling up across the United States as well; one needs only to think back to the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA that garnered national headlines.  True to form, though, Mingiu’s work does not place the full burden of blame on any single character as his work indicates that everyone is at fault when dealing with societal sins.  The film is still staunchly anti-xenophobia even without pinning any individual as the “villain” of the story.  

R.M.N. is Mingiu’s largest film to date in that the issues it is seeking to tackle requires putting an entire town under the microscope. He does so by utilizing an interwoven structure not dissimilar to Michael Haneke’s town-in-crisis mystery The White Ribbon (2009), though Haneke is more interested in the mystery while Mingiu focuses on morality.  The film also contains one of the most bravado sequences in the director’s already acclaimed career: a seventeen-minute unbroken shot during a town hall meeting where tensions come to a head on what to do about the Sri Lankan workforce.  As with the films of Asghar Farhadi, whose work Mingiu certainly seems to be emulating at least on a thematic level, these moral dilemmas require scenes where the characters can delve into and explain the philosophy of their stance, and critics of both Farhadi and Mingiu can cry that these necessary sequences drive the narrative to a halt.  It is almost always a bad-faith slight against their work as both writers are masters at weaving the heavy details into the rhythm of the scene, but here Mingiu wants to make sure his message and his disgust are not missed.  Audiences are forced to sit and listen and watch and the result is twofold.  Most immediately, it puts us in the cultural center with these characters embroiled in debate, but as the scene continues and Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s camera refuses to cut away, we are forced to begin weighing our own viewpoints against those being presented by the characters in the film.  No one is spared, most noticeably the racism of the townsfolk is criticized, but Dénes’ unlivable wage against her high expectations is examined as well as the town’s resolve to pay more for their bread if it means that the Sri Lankans will be sent back home.  Whether they would step up to the plate – and whether Dénes would raise their salaries – is left to the hypothetical the discussion quickly oscillates to various topics relating to the perceived hygiene, immunity, and immigration status of the three workers.  It should also be noted that the Hungarian side of the room seems most vocal against the Sri Lankans’ presence in town even though both sides are largely in agreement about their hate, but the Romanian side is also quick to demand the meeting be held in the native Romanian tongue. 

The tension is broken when news that Papa Otto had been found having hung himself in the woods is brought to the meeting house, and everyone quickly departs to the woods to retrieve the man.  It is an easy out for Mingiu who had written himself into a corner of how else to end a meeting where neither side was willing to cede to the other, but this bleak development fits well within the tone of the film so it does not seem as glaring an escape route as it actually is on paper.  Few of Mingiu’s characters, in this and his other films, ever experience anything remotely close to happiness – or even contentedness – and Panduru’s palate of icy blues and slate greys only helps foster that feeling of an oppressive life of disappointment at every turn, but he does is in such a way that audiences are still lured in by the framing.  Despite the ugliness of intolerance which the film examines, Panduru ensures that every frame is a beautiful portrait. 

For all the buzz surrounding the town hall sequence, Mingiu is not done and has an impressive finale in store where tensions continue to rise to even greater heights.  Despite the funeral service for Papa Otto that afternoon, the town is still on edge.  Matthias is stalking his way through the town at night after being reunited with his rifle; he is at once armed to protect himself from whatever wild things he encounters but in doing so has become an incredible danger to everyone around him.  He makes his way to Csilla’s home once more as she practices the cello – her appreciation for the arts is here used as a shorthand symbol for her enlightenment and worldliness despite never having left the town – and after disturbing her peace he leads her outside and takes aim at her with his rifle.  It is a terrifying sequence, and even for audiences in their safety on the other side of the screen, when the rifle fires there is a tense moment where we are unsure of who is left standing.  Matthias, it is revealed, has shot a wild bear that was behind Csilla, but he is hardly a hero in this scenario as he is the reason she was put in danger in the first place. The bear itself also serves as a symbol for Ben; another foreigner who the people claim has been sent to the village to fix the bear problem with science.  In the wake of Covid-19, specifically the vaccine rollout for viewers in the States, they will note that science has become a hotly debated issue as of late, and a growing distrust of the field has emerged from certain segments of the population. Mingiu ends his film with a purposefully dim-lit scene shot over Matthias’ shoulder as he followed the bear into the woods and soon there is another, a third, and a fourth bear, but it is unseen if they are real bears or a gathering of the more violent villagers in their bear costumes from the ancestral Christmas parade.  To use the Klan hoods here, which at least one member of the community had been shown to be bold enough to wear during a violent attack against the foreign workers, would have broken the ambiguity that Mingiu likes to end his films with. Either way, the bears do not attack Matthias, rather they look on seeing him as one of their own: more beast than man. 

R.M.N. fits well into the director’s canon of work as the boldest swing from a man who has not shied away from tackling issues such as safe abortion access, abuse within the power structures of the church, and the stigma attached to sexual assault survivors.  In all those other films, he followed a clear protagonist who was put into unfair scenarios that are all-too-real, but here we mainly follow Matthias – though a valid argument can be made that this is Csilla’s narrative to steer – whose views are more in line with the antagonist side of the film.  Here, Mingiu is interrogating everyone in the town whereas before he would only apply pressure on his subject.  Given this wider examination, it does not have the same teeth as his previous work, but its ambition is admirable, the filmmaking is brilliant, and the reverberations of the actions linger long after the credit roll.  While this film was inspired by a singular incident, it serves as an uncomfortable mirror across many societies because, unfortunately, racism and xenophobia still course through the veins of our communities, turning neighbor against neighbor and putting us all at risk no matter our race, status, or creed.