‘R.M.N.’ Review: Hatred Poisons the Mind

When a film is front-loaded with a roomful of bleating sheep, as in Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s “R.M.N.,” you can’t help feeling that bad things are going to happen. Especially to the sheep. It is also a rather ham-fisted bit of foreshadowing, especially in a movie as otherwise subtle and understated as Mr. Mungiu’s provocative fact-based fiction.

The latest entry in the occasional AMC+ showcase of independent world cinema, “R.M.N.” bears a title—a Romanian abbreviation for “nuclear magnetic resonance”—that is a provocation in itself. Is human misbehavior a chemical malfunction or physical deformity? And how do you define misbehavior? Based on the so-called Ditrău xenophobic incident, the movie’s principal event is the uprising of Transylvanian villagers—the torches are a nice touch—against the recruitment of Sri Lankan workers for the local bakery. Which is the story in only its simplest terms. What Mr. Mungiu puts together, in tandem with the ornate private lives of several main characters, is an anatomy of race hatred.

Eight-year-old Rudi (Mark Blenyesi) is walking to school through the woods just before the Christmas holiday when he sees something that stops him cold. He runs home; we don’t see what he’s seen. His father, Matthias (Marin Grigore), working the night shift at a slaughterhouse in Germany, gets a call that Rudi has stopped speaking and is ordered back to work by his boss, who calls him a “lazy [expletive deleted] Gypsy” and is promptly head-butted for his managerial aplomb. Matthias immediately flees back to Romania, police presumably on his trail.

Matthias has been absent from home for several reasons. There’s the money. There’s his girlfriend, Csilla ( Judith State ), who loves him, and his estranged wife, Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu), who doesn’t (thanks to Csilla). There’s his son, to whom Matthias can offer little besides a tutorial in survivalist skills, when the boy needs therapy and a modern future.

The personal stories are entryways into the movie, but the Gypsy slur is the first hint of what Mr. Mungiu is after in a grander sense. Mapping out the traffic patterns of European labor, Mr. Mungiu gives us a village where many—proud to have “driven the Gypsies out”—have left themselves for jobs in other EU countries. The remaining employables won’t work for minimum wage, which is what the local bakery can afford to pay without raising the price of bread. So its supervisor, Csilla, and its owner, Mrs. Dénes (Orsolya Moldován), advertise the jobs, no one applies, they look outside, and their broker comes back with the Sri Lankans. The locals recoil—they are largely Romanian-speaking Hungarians, although some, like Matthias, actually seem to have come out of the Roma gene pool and the entire town is a mix of ethnicities and languages that are overshadowed by race. Who wants black hands in their bread?

There’s a mystical element to “R.M.N.”—what did Rudi actually see?—and that includes a brief dive into Romanian traditions, including a Christmas pageant, and a mock battle between medieval “warriors” that involves “the uphills versus the downhills.” Which is a bit like those sheep—a gesture of metaphorical overkill by Mr. Mungiu on a point he otherwise makes with a great deal of grace and no shortage of tension or mystery.

—Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.