anywhere out of the world: On Our Own: emotionally evasive, visually irresistible

I caught Tudor Cristian Jurgiu’s On Our Own last night at its Romanian premiere, and it’s the kind of film that makes you feel as though half of contemporary European cinema has been trapped in a very tasteful group chat and nobody has yet found the courage to mute it.

Berlinale Forum may have been its official address, but spiritually it belongs to that familiar ecosystem of festival coming-of-age films where every teenager is shot like a saint in a Renaissance painting and every domestic problem is treated with the grave, hovering solemnity of a Chekhov play performed entirely over FaceTime.

It’s a film so drenched in youth-cinema mannerisms that at times I half expected someone to open a battered copy of The Catcher in the Rye, stare out of a bus window, and whisper something about emotional abandonment while an indie guitar line trembled politely in the background.

Which is a pity, because the premise is genuinely rich: Romanian children left to patch together a family life while their parents work abroad.

It’s the kind of setup that ought to land somewhere between the social abrasion of the Dardennes, the moral pressure cooker of Cristian Mungiu, and the aching domestic loneliness of a Ferrante novel.

Instead, Jurgiu’s film often feels like it has mistaken the idea of pain for its dramatic embodiment. Conflict is invoked, announced, carefully circled, but rarely allowed to fully materialise; the whole thing has the frustrating air of a novel that keeps underlining its own important themes in the margins instead of trusting the scene itself to do the work.

On Our Own is forever brushing against devastation without quite committing to it, like a teenager flirting with a bad decision and then going home at eleven.

And yet, maddeningly, I was still caught by it.

Not because the story moved me in any profound, soul-rearranging way — it didn’t exactly leave me sprawled on the floor in a puddle of feeling — but because I was absolutely seduced by the film’s surfaces, its mood, its image, its whole atmosphere of bruised, humid melancholy.

This is a film that looks so good it occasionally feels as if the cinematography has wandered in from a much better, more emotionally coherent movie and is trying to rescue the rest of it by sheer force of beauty.

If the script sometimes hovers in the realm of sociological sketch or festival-ready mood piece, the visuals are doing something far more persuasive: they’re making misery look intoxicating.

And the cinematography really is where the film develops a pulse.

There’s a tactile, velvety lushness to the image that often feels almost at odds with the material’s supposed realism. Apartment blocks, pavements, bedrooms, tired kitchens, adolescent faces — all of it is bathed in a kind of bruised glow, as though Romanian social realism had spent a semester abroad with Luca Guadagnino and come back with silk shirts and better posture.

At moments the visual world evokes the sensual melancholy of Call Me by Your Name stripped of its sunlit ease and relocated to a more economically bruised, emotionally suspended landscape; at others it has something of Andrea Arnold’s eye for teenage bodies moving through hostile space, if Arnold were suddenly possessed by the ghost of a fashion photographer.

There are frames that feel almost painterly in their attention to texture and light: faces emerging from shadow like unfinished Lucian Freud portraits, interiors arranged with the muted melancholy of Vilhelm Hammershøi, windows and corridors filmed as though they were existential thresholds in a Chantal Akerman film.

Jurgiu and his DOP understand, at least instinctively, that if narrative momentum is in short supply, visual atmosphere can function as a narcotic.

As a director, Jurgiu seems caught between two schools of European art cinema.

On the one hand, he clearly wants the naturalist authority of the Romanian New Wave: the observational patience, the deadpan rhythms, the refusal of melodramatic punctuation, the sense that life simply leaks onto the screen in all its awkward duration.

On the other, he also wants the tender lyricism of the contemporary festival coming-of-age film, with its close-ups of pensive faces, its drifting walks, its poetic little pauses that are meant to stand in for emotional revelation.

The result is a style that sometimes feels like Cristian Mungiu trying to direct Aftersun after three glasses of orange wine: severe realism softened by aesthetic yearning, social detail lacquered with a dreamy adolescent glaze.

It can be lovely; it can also feel maddeningly noncommittal, as if the film can’t decide whether it wants to wound you or just make sure you admire the framing.

Denisa Vraja, however, is the one element that cuts cleanly through all that tasteful hesitation.

As Flavia, she has the kind of face and presence that make you understand why cinema invented close-ups in the first place. Dirty-blonde hair, aquiline features, a slight asymmetry that gives her beauty friction and character rather than polish — she’s magnetic in that rare way young actors sometimes are before the industry has taught them to over-manage themselves.

She doesn’t feel “cast”; she feels discovered.

There’s something of Adèle Exarchopoulos in her ability to turn teenage opacity into something fiercely watchable, but there’s also a touch of Sandrine Bonnaire’s rawness, of early Léa Seydoux’s unreadable self-possession, even of a heroine from an Elena Ferrante adaptation who has somehow wandered into a Romanian social drama.

She can look at an adult with a mix of contempt, fatigue, disappointment and reluctant tenderness so precise it feels like its own monologue.

The male lead, meanwhile, has such intense Timothée Chalamet energy that the comparison almost becomes unavoidable — not in the lazy “slim boy with good hair” sense, but in the way he seems to carry fragility as both performance and burden.

Vlad Furtuna has that same dishevelled, poetic, vaguely consumptive quality.

He looks like he should be smoking clove cigarettes in a Rohmer remake while quoting Rimbaud to a girl who has already outgrown him emotionally.

If Chalamet is the patron saint of beautiful young men who seem both underfed and over-read, this one is well on his way to canonisation.

He has that same gift for making adolescent uncertainty look both exquisitely awkward and faintly mythic, as if he’s wandered out of a modernist novel and into a very expensive Miu Miu campaign.

The camera adores him in that now very recognisable arthouse way: all hollowed cheeks, soft sadness, and the promise of emotional ruin packaged as cheekbones.

He feels less like a character at times than a citation — a little bit Call Me by Your Name, a little bit Louis Garrel, a little bit “boy in a European poster staring at the middle distance because he has read one poem and a girl has looked at him strangely.”

He’s filmed with the kind of devotion usually reserved for saints, Renaissance princes, or boys in A24 trailers. You just know somebody, somewhere, is already drafting the profile piece about him titled something like The Face of Europe’s New Melancholy. In short: a casting director’s fever dream, and very much the kind of boy contemporary European cinema likes to present as both vulnerable child and doomed erotic object.

Still, it’s Vraja who gives the film whatever dramatic voltage it has.

She plays Flavia as a girl pulled violently between adolescence and reluctant adulthood, between impulsiveness and proto-maternal responsibility, between wanting to run away from the mess and realising she may be the only person remotely capable of cleaning it up.

There’s a real alertness in the performance, a jagged intelligence that makes you wish the film itself were a little less content to simply admire her from afar.

Too often Jurgiu gives her scenes that belong to the contemporary arthouse museum of underwritten teenage suffering: FaceTime calls, Zoom calls, long walks, stretches of silence, those moments where a young girl is asked to carry the emotional weight of an entire social thesis simply by staring into space with enough conviction.

It’s the sort of directing choice that seems to assume a body in motion automatically equals inner life — the cinematic equivalent of underlining a sentence in a novel and calling it depth.

And that, in the end, is the film’s great frustration. On Our Own often feels less lived than curated, less deeply felt than carefully assembled from recognisable pieces of modern festival grammar.

You can sense the lineage in every scene: the Dardennes for social urgency, Mungiu for familial rot, Arnold for feral youth, Guadagnino for visual sensuality, maybe even a little The Florida Project in the way childhood precarity is aestheticised into something bright and bruised.

But Jurgiu never fully metabolises those influences into something with a pulse of its own. The film keeps hovering in that maddening zone between sincerity and style exercise, between social-realist observation and beautifully lit adolescent ennui.

It wants to be a wound and ends up, more often than not, a mood.

And yet I have to admit that it’s a very seductive mood.

I wasn’t deeply moved by On Our Own; it didn’t crack me open, didn’t leave me carrying it around like a fresh bruise.

But I was caught by it, absolutely — by the image, by the texture, by Vraja, by Furtuna, by the way the film understands that if it can’t quite break your heart, it can at least flirt shamelessly with your eye.

It’s a beautiful, frustrating, faintly pretentious little object: part Romanian social drama, part Berlinale youth-film starter pack, part perfume ad for generational sorrow.

A film that doesn’t so much devastate as pose exquisitely in the general direction of devastation — but, annoyingly enough, sometimes that pose is very hard to resist.