«Wild animals», work without borders and racism in a story that makes everyone think (score 7 and 1/2)- Corriere.it

At the origin there is a news story: in a small village in Transylvania, the population rebelled against the arrival of some Sri Lankan workers to occupy those jobs in the bread factory that none of the locals wanted to accept. But what a Ken Loach would have turned into an upstanding politician (as he did in his last film presented at Cannes, The Old Oak), becomes with Cristian Mungiu something much more articulated and complex, which delves into the problems of a Romania grappling with a modernization full of contradictions but which wants to overcome geographical borders to speak to everyone. And that also has a lot to say to us Italians.

Wild animals (so the title was changed original that MRIi.e. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, an operation which the father of the protagonist undergoes and which was a metaphor for an excavation to find a disease that is hidden in the depths) tells of Matthias (Marin Grigore) who for a fit of anger - his boss he called him back to duty by calling him a gypsy – he left Germany where he had worked for two years and was forced to return home to Transylvania.

His wife Ana (Macrina Barladeanu) does not welcome him certainly with open arms because she knows of the relationship he had before leaving with Csilla (Judith State), director of the industrial bakery, and who she fears will start again, but also because she does not share the exaggeratedly authoritarian ways with which Matthias would like to force Rudi (Mark Edward Blenyesi ), his still infant son, dealing with the seemingly irrational fear of something threatening him on the way to school. And that perhaps also at the origin of his silence.

The theme of racism towards non-EU citizens has not yet come to light and Mungiu (who signed the screenplay himself) brought out the myth of the male as a fighter (To survive you need to know how to fight. People who have mercy die first. I want you to die last teaches Rudi ) and the presumed supremacy of man over woman, not so much towards his wife whom he considers as a servant, but towards Csilla, whose independence and freedom, even sexual, he does not want to accept. Without forgetting the rift between ethnic groups that crosses Transylvania where Romanians and Hungarian minorities coexist not without friction. As can be seen perfectly in the ice hockey match between two towns, one with a Romanian majority and the other Hungarian.

One caveat. Try to see the movie in the original version because the subtitles have different colors depending on the language in which they are spoken: white captions for Romanian speakers, light yellow for Hungarian and light pink for other languages.

in this context the grain explodes of migrant workers. To obtain European Union funds, the bread factory must hire other employees and none of the locals willing to accept the proposed wages (better to receive unemployment benefit they say). Thus Csilla pushes the owner (Orsolya Moldovn) to hire three immigrant workers from Sri Lanka, triggering the rash reactions of some villagers: those who fear the arrival of mysterious diseases, those who are concerned that they will introduce polygamy (one of the workers Catholic but is expelled from the church anyway) or proliferate like rabbits, who of course already see attacks and massacres…

The situation precipitates and Mungiu he tells it to us in the style of the great masters: enveloping long shots that stalk people and a 17-minute scene to tell an assembly where languages ​​overlap and people collide, without the camera moving a millimeter but without the viewer almost noticing it.

And if in the end many questions remain unresolvedincluding the one on the ghosts of wild animals that roam those places, the winner will be a cinema that asks the viewer to get involved and to search within themselves for the missing answers.