From left, Marin Grigore, Mark Edward Blenyesi, and Macrina Barladeanu in R.M.N. (Mobra Films/IFC Films)

Of all the films at last year’s New York Film Festival, one sequence stood out as a directorial tour-de-force. In Cristian Mungiu’s scalding R.M.N., a 15-minute uninterrupted take is like watching a tennis match, with the focus volleying across multiple directions during a heated, raucous community meeting in a Romanian town without pity. The static camera captures all the sneers, rebuffs, suspicions, and bigotry among dozens of townsfolk.

The title translates in English as nuclear magnetic resonance. In the words of writer/director Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), this means, “an investigation of the brain, a brain scan trying to detect things below the surface.” Though his explanation may imply a drama simmering undercurrents, Mungiu lays bare the tensions, pettiness, and fears that are hardly below the surface. The residents of a mountainous Transylvanian town bare their unfiltered acrimony to each other unabashedly. Except for the strong, silent, and insipid central character, the bearded and burly Matthias (Marin Grigore), few hold back. They speak their mind and then some. Mungiu has taken the temperature of the populace, and it has a high fever. Here identity politics are taken to a xenophobic extreme when the local bakery hires three workers from Sri Lanka, inciting open hostility from the villagers.

Before the powder-keg of tensions explode, the film begins ominously enough: An eight-year-old boy, Rudi (Mark Edward Blenyesi), sees something horrific off-screen. As the plot unfolds, one imagines a number of scenarios that he may have witnessed, all involving violence. The boy’s mother telephones the absent father, the aforementioned Matthias, who works in a slaughterhouse in Germany. While he takes an unauthorized break for the call, his supervisor roughly reprimands him to get back to work, calling him an ethnic slur. A silent hothead, Matthias acts before he speaks. He slugs his boss, nonchalantly walks out unnoticed, and hitchhikes his way back to his home town in Romania.

He returns to a terrified and silent Rudi and a wife he hasn’t seen in years—Ana (Macrina Barladeanu) barely looks at him, puzzled on why he has come back. Without discussion, it’s understood that he will sleep on the couch. (Barladeanu simply steals scenes with a glaring glance.) Meanwhile, the boy won’t speak. He has only told his mother that he saw “something bad.”

In short order, Matthias resumes a longstanding relationship with the town sophisticate, Csilla (Judith Slate), a manager at the area’s main employer, a bread baking company that has hired the three foreign workers—the factory needed to beef up its staff as a requirement for aid from the European Union. The positions have long been vacant; few locals are willing to work for minimum wage, though the former main industry, mining, has closed shop. Fully aware that her husband has started seeing his former flame, Ana kicks Matthias out of the house. He crashes as the home of a father figure, Papa Otto (Andrei Finti), whose health is failing (and who stands as a walking metaphor for the village itself). 

Here, everyone knows their ancestral family tree down to the Middle Ages. Matthias is a descendant of German settlers from hundreds of years ago, which he proudly mentions more than once. Csilla casually clarifies to a colleague that she’s Romanian but ethnically Hungarian.

Viewers have seen Matthias’s type of machismo before. He is so emotionally repressed, he comes across as stolid. Predictably, he overreacts when he finds out that his son has taken up crocheting, and is repulsed by the idea that Rudi needs to be accompanied to school through the woods where he saw the mysterious incident. Like the ailing Papa Otto, Matthias serves more as the tour guide or the barometer of the local state of mind. (Here is where the brain scan of the title may come in.)

Crucially, both his wife, Ana, and Csilla act as counterweights against his hollow bluster. Csilla is an anomaly in this humble hamlet: white-collar, artistic, a leader in the local orchestra. For relaxation at home, she plays along with her cello to the love theme from In the Mood for Love, perhaps a pointed riposte to the bourgeois ideal in an area where unemployment runs rampant. That the willowy Csilla and the ursine Matthias are polar opposites may be the foundation of the relationship, but it also feels a bit like a writer’s construct to heighten the tension: Matthias joins the majority in wanting the three South Asian men kicked out of the factory and the country, while Csilla becomes a protective surrogate mother, guarding over the three workers after the men receive death threats.

After creating such a vivid depiction of a town with bleak prospects and corrosive groupthink, the director takes a gamble with a whammy of an allegorical ending, shaking the film out of its slyly satiric, realistic tone and throwing the audience for a loop. For some, the conclusion comes across as deflating, perplexing, too subtle, and out of step from the rest of the movie (considering the villagers keep hammering home their venom toward the South Asian workers).

However, viewers may recall one mocking retort in particular, one regarding Romania’s original inhabitants. Also, pay attention to the rich sound design: It offers plenty of clues on who, or what, is really in charge. The soundscape captures a cacophony of natural sounds—it’s rare when a dog isn’t barking in the background. All help to tie the ending to what may otherwise seem like a fantastical excerpt from another film. Still, any puzzlement doesn’t undermine Mungiu’s caustic, blunt vision of a dying community on the defensive.