The cinema of Radu Jude is a cinema of collision. A collision between past and present, fiction and documentary, the polished image of capital and the grainy texture of lived life. With "Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World", the Romanian director doesn’t just orchestrate a pile-up of forms and ideas; he hurls an entire scrapyard at the screen, a deafening, caustic, and brilliant wreck of our contemporary world. The protagonist, Angela, is our Virgil in this neoliberal inferno. An underpaid and over-exploited production assistant, she spends her days behind the wheel, crossing a Bucharest that is an architectural and spiritual palimpsest of traumas that have never been laid to rest. She drives for hours, fueled by caffeine and rage, on behalf of an Austrian multinational that wants to shoot a workplace safety video. Her task: to cast the perfect victim, a worker disabled in an accident, whose story, suitably sanitized, can become an edifying corporate spot.

Jude shoots the first part of Angela’s journey in a rough, grainy black and white, on 16mm film, a format that immediately evokes a sense of documentary urgency, almost like a 1960s cinéma-vérité. But this is no aesthetic whim. This choice is a dialectical device, because it embeds into its narrative fragments of another film, Lucian Bratu’s Angela merge mai departe (Angela Moves On), from 1981. In that film, another Angela, a taxi driver in Ceaușescu’s Bucharest, navigated the same streets with different, yet perhaps not so dissimilar, dreams and problems. Jude isn't creating a simple hall-of-mirrors effect; he stages a temporal short-circuit. The Angela of 1981, a symbol of timid emancipation under an oppressive regime, converses with her 2023 namesake, a precarious slave to a system that has replaced the dictatorship of the Party with that of profit. The streets are the same, as are the dilapidated buildings, but the ideology governing them has changed, leaving the substance of exploitation intact. This is an operation reminiscent of Situationist dérives, the détournement of pre-existing images to unveil the hidden structure of power, or the iconoclastic fury of Godard in his Dziga Vertov Group period, who dismantled cinematic language to make it a weapon of political critique.

If the form is a declaration of intent, the content is a gut punch delivered with a mocking smile. Angela's true release valve, her digital avatar, is the true keystone of the film. With a grotesque filter that deforms her face, she transforms into "Bobita," a sort of Balkan Andrew Tate, a vulgar, misogynistic, conspiracy-theorist character who spews his philippics across social media against "the system," women, and political correctness. It is here that Jude's genius explodes in all its satirical power. Bobita is not just a commentary on the toxic vacuity of influencer culture; he is a perfect Brechtian device. He is the carnivalesque mask, in the most Bakhtinian sense of the term, through which Angela can invert her frustration, channeling the humiliation she suffers into a grotesque performance of power. By donning the guise of her ideological oppressor, she mimics his violent language to exorcise it. It is a choice as hilarious as it is terrifying, one that shoves in our faces the schizophrenia of a present in which the only form of rebellion permitted seems to be a hyperbolic parody of the system itself.

The film is a kind of Kafkian road movie, a journey into the heart of darkness of corporate bureaucracy. Angela's odyssey to find the right "face" for the multinational's propaganda becomes a gallery of wounded humanity, a catalogue of the collateral victims of progress. The search culminates in her meeting Ovidiu, a man whose leg was mangled in a workplace accident. His story, raw and real, must be smoothed over, rewritten, transformed into a fairy tale with a happy ending in which the blame lies not with the production system but with individual carelessness, and the company appears as a benevolent savior. The entire process is a macabre farce, a lucid allegory of how the language of marketing and public relations consumes and neutralizes every form of truth. The multinational's delegate, with her plastic smile and her textbook-English platitudes, is a high priestess of this cult of the image, indifferent to reality as long as the official narrative remains unscratched.

The quote that gives the film its title, from the Polish aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec, "Do not expect too much from the end of the world," hovers over every frame. There was no apocalypse, no clean break. Rather, there has been a slow, inexorable wearing down. The end of the world is not an event, but a condition. It is Angela's condition, trapped in a cycle of endless work. It is Ovidiu's condition, whose broken body must become a billboard. It is the condition of a country where the ruins of communism serve as a spectral backdrop to the glittering signs of global capitalism, like a W. G. Sebald novel set in a shopping mall. Jude doesn't judge, nor does he offer easy solutions. His gaze is that of a merciless entomologist observing the contortions of insects trapped in a glass case.

The film's climax is a tour de force of direction and intellectual cruelty. The final scene, a very long, static sequence shot in which the corporate spot is filmed, is a masterpiece of tension and social analysis. In a single shot, Jude condenses all the film's contradictions. We see the crew, the corporate delegate, Ovidiu's family forced to play a humiliating part, and finally Angela, whose face becomes a mask of exhaustion, contempt, and, perhaps, a silent, imminent implosion. Reality and its fictitious representation coexist in the same space, locked in an exhausting struggle. It's an ending that denies all catharsis, leaving us with a sense of profound unease and with the chilling awareness that the camera, like capital, can be the most ruthless instrument of all.

"Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World" is a monster of a film, a punk collage that mixes TikTok and neorealism, absurdist comedy and the political essay. It is a demanding work, at times grueling, but one of dazzling lucidity and intelligence. Radu Jude confirms his status not only as the most ruthless chronicler of the neuroses of post-communist Romania, but as one of the few directors working today capable of inventing a cinematic language that can capture the polycentric madness of our time. This is the cinema we deserve: fragmented, angry, desperately comical, and brutally honest. Do not expect consolation, but prepare for a revelation.