Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Punk Driving

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

I had no idea what to make of Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, so I more or less dismissed it at the time, but it still somehow managed to rattle around in my brain for months (years) after seeing it. I had much the same reaction to Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, but this time I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Already it has been several weeks and I keep thinking about this bizarre, experimental, and extremely long comedy, which manages to be funny without actually making us laugh, and which manages to say many things while seeming to say hardly anything at all.

Ilinca Manolache (who had a small role in Bad Luck Banging) plays Angela, an overworked production assistant helping to cast a video about workplace safety by interviewing survivors of accidents. The movie is set over the course of one long day as she wakes up at the crack of dawn and works well past dark, wearing a sequined dress. She spends most of the movie in her car — these sequences are in black-and-white — her blond hair flying in the wind as she blows bubblegum bubbles. Every so often she shoots TikTok videos using a filter that makes her look like a creepy male troll, with a five-o'clock shadow and a bushy unibrow, saying sexist things so demented that they're almost funny.

And every so often we see footage from a real 1982 Romanian movie called Angela merge mai departe about a cab driver (also named Angela) who hopes for something meaningful during her interactions with customers. We also get cameos by, of all people, the legendarily bad filmmaker Uwe Boll (Alone in the Dark) and the respected German performer Nina Hoss (Phoenix, Tár). The movie is a real ride, never going anywhere conventional, using lots of long takes and arhythmic cuts. And Angela is one of the best characters of the year, keeping a plucky energy going despite the utter hopelessness of it all.