REVIEW - BEYOND THE HILLS

A potentially scarring experience, rendered admirable but not quite as impactful as intended by an avoidance of sensationalism. Director Cristian Mungiu is a fraction too civil in his portrayal of unyielding Orthodox Christians in a barren monastery in rural Romania. Their harsh conditions and glum lifestyles are depicted accurately but not evocatively. We see but we do not feel. We do not even always see, and Mungiu's literal approach to this story wards off any subtextual depths, psychological or social, like the nuns obsessively ward off the influences and manifestations of evil, as they see it. It's an austere, pure, pious style of filmmaking, well-matched to the material but perhaps not well-suited, and he employed it to indelible effect in his acclaimed 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, but to lesser effect here. The story circles around itself several times, and an air of pointlessness eventually undermines any atmosphere created by the sensitive cinematography and excellent, unaffected performances from the cast. Still, Mungiu is a highly skilled director, with an immaculate sense of space and blocking, and a subtly creative eye and ear for indirect methods of storytelling, which he uses most efficaciously. Characterisation is superb, as is the portrayal of life under specific circumstances, be this for the nuns and their priest, whose roles and relationships are immediately clear, or for the inhabitants of the nearby town, so expressively related in very limited screentime. The film teeters on the edge of horror toward the end, but Mungiu's unrelenting ambiguity of tone prevents it from fully succumbing, which is only to its detriment - a more tangible sense of claustrophobia would have had great effect, and the film becomes brash and manic just when it ought to become close and tense. All sacrificed in the name of realism. I shouldn't complain.