LGM Film Club, Part 446: Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

We started 2025 in this series with Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a brilliant, if messy, satire of modern Romania through the eyes of a teacher whose idiot husband uploaded their sex tape to the internet and now has to face angry and idiotic parents. Jude routinely takes a flamethrower to his nation’s flaws, past and present. I’ve also seen Afreim, a “comedy” of sorts from 2015 about his nation’s enslavement of the Roma in the 19th century.

Now it was time for his latest film, released last year and widely considered one of the best films of the year. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is not the most subtle film, as one would expect from Jude. It is, however, amazing in all the ways one can mean that word.

The story focuses on a young woman who works for a film production company. The company has a contract to produce a workplace safety film based on one of the many workers for this Austrian company that have been hurt on the job. Her job is to go around to the various possible people and film them to see which will get the thousand Euros and make some propaganda for the company. The irony of this is that she is working about 18 hours a day for this company while making this workplace safety film. This irony is very much not lost on her. She’s pissed. Our hero also has a side bit. As you may remember, the utter scumbag Andrew Tate used Romania as his personal rape zone before he was arrested for sex trafficking. So she uses a filter where she becomes his face and records these extremely obscene videos about fucking all the bitches and how great Putin is. That’s some of the satire. But even in regular life, she tells some of the filthiest jokes you will ever hear. And talks about how much she wants the rich to suffer and die.

Also, much of the film is her driving around and engaging in road rage incidents; in fact, the horrible driving of Romanians is a surprisingly large part of the film, including a 10 or so minute montage about 3/4 of the way through the film of pictures of crosses remembering the dead from driving accidents. As with so many of Jude’s films, the horrifically awful day to day behavior of his fellow Romanians is a big thing here.

Then Uwe Boll shows up in the middle of the movie, playing himself, he and our hero get in a conversation about him beating up film critics, and then he joins her for one of her Andrew Tate selfie movies.

But wait, there’s more! See, all the driving scenes are framed with borrowing from an important Romanian Cold War film. Angela Moves On was a 1981 film about a female taxi driver that was evidently about as big of a satire of society as you could get under Ceaușescu. It looks pretty peaceful compared to the driving scenes in the present! Well, Jude combines the two films, casting the woman who played the taxi driver as a retired taxi driver today whose son is the guy chosen to film the workplace safety video.

And then there’s the last half hour of the film, where they film the workplace safety video and the company simply won’t allow the guy to say what happened because the company is so unbelievably negligent and also wants to keep its contracts with Putin. This all might be the funniest part of what actually is a very funny film.

So yeah, Jude, as always, is doing a lot. But goddamn if this isn’t one of the most brilliant satires of modern society I have seen. I don’t think this is quite my favorite film of 2024. It is the one I respect the most.

Jude is next doing the first ever Romanian Dracula movie and Lord knows what that is going to look like. He describes it as “Dracula, emotion, sex, nudity, vampires, zombies, action, lots of blood, violence, AI images, car chases and good quality comedy! 15 strong stories plus jokes, jokes, jokes – like “you’ll laugh until you piss yourself”, as it says on specialized sites.” Good god……..I can’t wait.

I gotta say, the trailer really nails what you are in for: