Radu Jude’s new movie “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” is a dry but undeniably sharp black comedy which patiently takes its time for building up its comic momentum. Although you may be daunted by its rather long running time (165 minutes) at first, the movie keeps holding our attention as steadily doling out one humorous moment after another for more than 2 hours, and it becomes all the more painfully funny when the story eventually reaches a comic climax you have to see for yourself.

The story is mainly about one long and difficult day of Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a weary female assistant working in the production of a little education film produced by some big company in Austria. Her current task is recording the audition video clips of a number of various people who were seriously injured while working for the company, and that means she has to driver her car here and there in Bucharest, Romania during next several hours for visiting those unfortunate people one by one.

Mainly because she does not get paid enough for her rather thankless main job, Angela also often works as an anonymous online media creator hiding behind the image of a certain real-life male figure which will definitely disgust most of you for good reasons. While keeping her real identity secret as much as possible, she frequently throws a lot of vile and hateful words in front of her smartphone, and we gradually gather that she has actually been pretty popular for that on the Internet.

Closely observing how Angela struggles to get her jobs done within one day, the movie lets us understand that this virulently superficial online activity of hers is one of her own ways of dealing with the constant stress and frustration from her main job. She surely feels like having some power and control whenever wielding her toxic online persona on the Internet, and she is not even ashamed of that at all as shown to us later in the film (“I’m like Charlie Hebdo, sucker!”).

In case of some other people working with Angela, they are no better than her with their cynically callous attitude toward whatever they are going to make in the end. All they really care about is doing the job and then getting paid enough, and that is evident when Angela and they subsequently have a video conference meeting with a company executive who will soon come to Bucharest for the supervision of the production (Nina Hoss, who has mostly known for her notable collaborations with Christian Petzold, demonstrates the unexpected side of her considerable talent here in this film). Casually looking over their candidates, they eliminate one candidate after another without much thought, and we get some little laugh when Angela later commits a little act of contempt behind her back.

This absurd sequence feels quite painful to us at times because we observed the misery and desperation of those candidates before that. Unable to get re-employed after getting injured and then fired without much compensation, these unfortunate people are all quite desperate for any chance for the money to support themselves and their families, and we naturally feel uncomfortable about how Angela handles these people without much care or attention, even while tickled by some unexpected moments of absurdity observed from their individual scenes with Angela.

Meanwhile, the movie sometimes inserts the excerpts from the 1981 Romania film “Angela Moves On” (1981), which is about the daily life of one female taxi driver. The Romania society glimpsed from in that old movie certainly makes an interesting contrast with how the current Romania society is starkly presented in black and white film in the movie. Yes, the Romania society during the 1980s was inarguably bleak and terrible under the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, but the current Romania society does not look exactly better although its people surely have much more freedom and right than before, and the movie eventually comes to reveal more of its indirect contempt toward the inherent amorality and heartlessness of capitalism along the story.

Around a certain point where it switches from black and white film to color film, the movie goes for more satire and amusement, and the resulting extended sequence is quite compelling to watch. While the camera simply observed from its static position, one absurd moment after another happens across the screen, and we are alternatively amused and repulsed as Angela and several figures insensitively push the chosen candidate and his family toward more and more compromise. Ilinca Manolache, who certainly leaves a strong comic impression here in this film, and several other main cast members during this sequence are flawless in their natural comic timing, and everything on the screen eventually culminates to what can be regarded as a bitter punchline for us.

In conclusion, “Do No Expect Too Much from the End of the World” is another interesting work from Jude, who previously drew my attention for his previous film “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” (2021). Like “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”, the movie is willing to go as far as possible for dark laughs, and I particularly like the brief appearance of a certain notorious German filmmaker in the middle of the movie. Yes, both of these two comedy films remain a rather acquired taste to me, but they surely solidify Jude’s status as another interesting Romanian filmmaker to watch, and he will probably impress me more with whatever will come next from him.