Searing drama ‘R.M.N.’ asks, who belongs and who doesn’t?

The new Romanian film “R.M.N.” is one of the most searing cinematic examinations of xenophobia I’ve ever seen. The writer-director Cristian Mungiu doesn’t pull any punches and yet, somehow, the movie is not a shrill polemic. I think this is because Mungiu is an artist, not a pamphleteer. He gives everyone in the film, no matter how intolerant, a voice. He wants to understand the complicated reasons why they hate the way they do. They are portrayed as aggrieved humans, not cardboard villains, which, of course, makes their bigotry even more unsettling.

The film is set in 2019 in a rural village in Transylvania. The gruff, burly Matthias (Marin Grigore) has returned home after a run-in with an overseer at a sheep slaughterhouse in Germany, where he traveled to find work. His reunion with his estranged wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) and young son Rudi (Mark Edward Blenyesi) does not go well. The boy has become mute after witnessing something unspecified and scary in the forest on his lone walk to school. Matthias blames Ana for pampering his fears.

Matthias looks in on an old girlfriend, Csilla (Judith State), now divorced and the manager of a local bakery, who reluctantly submits to his coarse advances. Since the village mine shut down, there has been almost no work except for the lowest pay, and so Csilla, and her boss (Orsolya Moldován), bring in three Sri Lankans to knead the bread. They are paid the wages most of the locals won’t accept. (The point is thus made that even some so-called humanitarians are exploiters.) Although citizens and not migrants, the trio are immediately branded by many in the community as intruders or, worse, emissaries of a coming pestilence.

Transylvania is depicted as a complex cross section of ethnicities, mostly Romanians, ethnic Hungarians (such as Csilla), and some Germans. Instead of promoting forbearance, this uneasy mixture fans fears of the Other. The villagers are particularly proud of the fact that the Roma population was driven out decades earlier. (Matthias is part Romani.) In these environs, it makes tragic sense that the Sri Lankans should be targeted.

The film’s title is an acronym for the Romanian equivalent of magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, a procedure which Matthias’ ailing father undergoes. But the usage here is clearly metaphorical: Mungiu – whose great 2007 abortion drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” was similarly searing – is holding this community to account. At times, it’s almost as if we are watching a Romanian variation on “High Noon,” where one by one the town’s upright, liberal voices are quelled or compromised.

Many fear the Sri Lankans will spread disease by touching the bread. A doctor who initially seems reasonable later concludes that the trio has a “different viral pathology.” The village priest, who at first proclaims the workers are children of God, retreats into the tribal consensus. “They can be God’s children back home,” shouts a villager. Even the bakery boss, who stood up to the outcry, backslides, fearing the loss of her business.

In the film’s most remarkable set piece, shot in the town hall in a single, 17-minute take, all of the community’s festering rages and resentments come through. Mungiu gives everyone their due, if not his endorsement. One of the insurgents proclaims ominously, “The West is watching.” The words carry a double meaning he likely did not intend. The village inevitably comes across as a microcosm for the racist alarms sweeping through Europe – in fact, the world.

Mungiu does not offer an easy remedy for this toxic mess. How could he? But no one who makes a movie this vehement can fail to harbor a hope for what human beings, at their best, can be. “R.M.N.” is the work of an outraged idealist.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. Unrated “R.M.N.” is available in theaters. It is in Romanian, Hungarian, and German, with English subtitles.