‘Beyond the Hills’ is different sort of horror movie

Rating None, though there is violence and nudity. 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Bottom line:

By Michael Phillips

Chicago Tribune

Of all the movies culminating in a rite of exorcism, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s remarkable “Beyond the Hills” stands alone.

It is a different sort of horror movie, focused on character and on the precarious emotional state of lovers whose affair has come to an abrupt close. Mungiu, whose works include “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (once seen, never forgotten), allows his story to breathe and to evoke a community and a country where, as they say, everyone has their reasons. And nothing quite works as it should.

It springs from a real event. In 2005, BBC Bucharest bureau chief Tatiana Niculescu Bran reported on an incident in which a young woman visiting a friend, a novice in a rural Moldavian monastery, died after being subjected to a form of exorcism. The Orthodox Church condemned the event, and the case went to trial and became notorious.

“Alina, let me go. People are looking.” So says the raven-haired Voichita, meeting her lifelong friend at the train station. Alina has returned to Romania from Germany. She can barely breathe for the desperate relief at seeing her old friend from the orphanage again.

But things are different now. Voichita cannot continue their relationship (the women became lovers at some point in their friendship, years earlier). She has joined an Orthodox monastery, The New Hill, a stern place where a dozen or so nuns in residence call the priest “Papa” and the visiting Alina rightly views everyone and everything as the key to her unhappiness.

At dinner, Papa preaches of the evils of the secular world. “Nothing sacred,” he says. “Everything is allowed.” With Lent just around the corner, he urges Alina to confess her sins and, it’s inferred, forget her feelings for Voichita.

Typical of the film’s dramatic strategy, we never see that confession, only its aftermath, just as Alina’s apparent suicide attempt at the monastery remains off screen. Mungiu cannily keeps us in a state of dread and wonder at just how far the events of “Beyond the Hills” will travel beyond the pale, plausibly. It’s an enraging picture.

In its Cannes premiere last year, Mungiu’s film won a rare two awards (usually it’s one per winner), for the screenplay and a shared actress award for the leading performers. As Alina, Cristina Flutur maximizes her character’s watchful, coiled traits, and she’s plenty fearless when in extremis. Cosmina Stratan’s Voichita, plaintive and wide-eyed, suggests a woman ashamed of her past and unsure of the trust she’s placed in Papa (Valeriu Andriuta), a power-plant worker who saw God one day and now heads the monastery.

The film’s coda overstays its welcome and, I think, settles for an easy, weary shrug that belongs to a different picture. “4 Months” stayed sharp and riveting to the final second; this one’s a little looser. But “Beyond the Hills” is an experience: 2 1/2 hours of real and supple cinema.