The dead, as Henry James knew perfectly well, are terrible tenants. They refuse to leave, occupy other people's sentences, rearrange furniture, borrow bodies, and demand endless administrative paperwork.
In Don't Let Me Die, Andrei Epure imagines what would happen if a ghost story were directed by Aki Kaurismäki after binge-watching Twin Peaks, rewritten by Kafka during an especially bureaucratic morning, and photographed as though Edward Hopper had wandered into a de Chirico piazza carrying a camera instead of a paintbrush.
The premise is deliciously Romanian, which is to say simultaneously tragic, absurd, metaphysical and administrative. Maria (the extraordinary Cosmina Stratan) discovers a dead woman, Isabela (an astonishing Elina Löwensohn), collapsed at the entrance of her apartment building. The neighbors disappear with the speed of guilty apostles. The ambulance arrives. The police arrive. Bureaucracy arrives with the solemn efficiency of a Beckett character who has finally found employment. Compassion, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found.
Epure has been rehearsing this cinematic séance ever since Intercom 15, his remarkable Cannes Critics' Week short, but the feature performs a fascinating mutation. The short was a sharp anecdote; the feature grows tentacles. It begins like Cristian Mungiu, slowly mutates into Roman Polanski's The Tenant, borrows the haunted architecture of Jacques Tourneur, steals the deadpan timing of Roy Andersson, flirts shamelessly with David Lynch, then somehow lands somewhere only Romanian cinema could possibly inhabit: a bureaucratic ghost story where municipal offices are more terrifying than cemeteries.
The inspiration famously came from a newspaper story about a woman discovered weeks after her death. Yet Epure is after something larger than loneliness. His real subject is what happens after empathy itself has quietly emigrated. The horror is not that somebody dies alone. The horror is that society has developed perfect administrative procedures for processing the dead without ever acknowledging that they once possessed warmth.
If Kafka had written The Sixth Sense, it might have looked something like this.
Cosmina Stratan gives what may well be one of the finest performances of the year.
Her Maria scarcely appears to act at all. She absorbs. She listens. She hesitates. Every silence seems to have another silence folded inside it. Like Maria Falconetti stripped of martyrdom and deposited inside a Romanian housing estate, Stratan performs almost entirely through microscopic muscular events: a blink delayed by half a second, a shoulder refusing consolation, a face becoming the battlefield where guilt, tenderness, exhaustion and bewilderment negotiate fragile truces.
Opposite her, Elina Löwensohn achieves something even stranger.
She is simultaneously absent and omnipresent, dead yet magnetically alive. Few actresses possess her uncanny ability to make stillness feel volcanic.
She enters the film almost like a painting by Egon Schiele abandoned in a stairwell, then gradually becomes a phantom worthy of Henry James, Cocteau's Orphée, or the melancholy revenants drifting through Apichatpong Weerasethakul's forests.
Her Isabela isn't merely haunting Maria. She haunts the very grammar of the film.
Visually, Laurențiu Răducanu accomplishes something miraculous.
Every corridor seems painted by Giorgio de Chirico after moving into a socialist housing project. Empty hallways stretch like metaphysical deserts. Darkness behaves almost materially, thick enough to lean against.
Faces emerge from shadows with the bruised luminosity of Georges de La Tour, while the interiors frequently resemble Vilhelm Hammershøi paintings where solitude has become architectural rather than psychological.
Rarely has Romanian realism looked this close to metaphysical painting.
The sound design performs equal sorcery. Nathalie Vidal transforms intercom buzzes, distant screams, barking dogs and nocturnal vibrations into a sinister urban requiem somewhere between Lynchian industrial nightmares and the acoustic paranoia of The Conversation. Every wall seems porous; every apartment leaks somebody else's anxiety.
And then comes the film's most astonishing sleight of hand.
Ghost stories traditionally end with an exorcism, a prayer, an ancient ritual, perhaps an old woman who knows Latin. Epure proposes something infinitely stranger. The restless soul is neither expelled nor defeated. It is... seduced.
Without giving away the mechanics of the finale, the film discovers an almost scandalously tender solution to possession. What initially appears to be grief slowly ferments into intimacy, intimacy into identification, identification into something resembling erotic attraction.
The boundary between the living and the dead dissolves less through horror than through desire.
One almost wants to ask afterwards: was that an exorcism or a love scene?
Was that possession or consummation?
Was Maria rescuing Isabela—or allowing herself to become temporarily inhabited so both women could finally be released?
It's an extraordinary narrative gamble because it refuses the usual binary of haunting versus liberation. Instead, Epure imagines mourning as mutual occupation. The dead leave only after they have been fully welcomed.
There is something gloriously baroque about the idea. Bernini would have understood it immediately. So would Bataille.
Not everything works.
The screenplay occasionally withholds psychological information less out of mystery than out of caution, and one sometimes wishes Maria's own emotional history were drawn with greater specificity. Yet these are surprisingly minor reservations in a film so confident about its atmosphere.
Like all successful ghost stories—from The Innocents to Personal Shopper—its real subject is never the supernatural.
It is loneliness.
Romanian cinema has often been accused of mistaking minimalism for austerity.
Don't Let Me Die quietly disproves the charge.
Beneath its static frames and muted colors lurks a wildly imaginative film—a metaphysical comedy disguised as social realism, a bureaucratic gothic romance masquerading as kitchen-sink cinema, a ghost story where paperwork replaces holy water and desire proves considerably more efficient than religion.
Death, Epure suggests, is merely the beginning of another impossible relationship.
By Giulia Dobre
at TIFF 2026, Cluj.
JUne 24th 2026
#dead
#ghost
#dontletmedie
#elinalowenshon
#cosminastratan
No comments:
Post a Comment