Potentially the festival’s best film, The Death of Mr Lazarescu may also prove to be its most misunderstood. No mistaking that Cristi Puiu’s sophomore effort is this year’s Kings and Queen; Arnaud Desplechin’s multifarious tragicomedy from 2005 a similarly vast, freakish 150-minute tour de force of networked mayhem and colliding human beings. Audiences apparently didn’t get that film (the reaction didn’t appear to be as immediately positive, at least), and Lazarescu’s wares are even less obvious, and doesn’t benefit from the rep of French cinema or the hook of an Emmanuelle Devos. Here, our ailing protagonist is played by the shabby, sixty-something Ion Fiscuteanu – hardly poster material – and how exactly you market a Romanian film about an elderly, self-defecating drunk seeking urgent medical attention is beyond me.

And yet this is truly unlike anything you’ll see this year: a magnum opus excavating the odd, frustrating, strangely compelling misadventures of Mr Lazarescu and his deteriorating, increasingly elusive condition. Ostensibly, events unfold with the curiosity of a serial medical mystery; it’s like House rewritten by David Simon, with grubby corridors, putrid halogen lighting, bureaucratic obstacles, and infuriating dead ends. And waiting. Although this plays out like one of those fly-on-the-wall Reality TV series, everything’s so deliberately designed, precisely acted, and shrewdly elongated into a pseudo-real time that it eschews the hyperactive tempo and decorative modes of medical/forensic television currently on air. The expectation of gross-out surgical procedure never eventuates either, further subverting the macabre OR sensationalism being peddled by the likes of Bodies and Nip/Tuck.

By the same token though, this is also such an impressive feat of filmmaking that qualifying it as a “medial drama” seems rather belittling. The plight of Mr Lazarescu is the film’s backbone; its theatre and dark humour in its many rabbit holes; his helplessness in the face of well-meaning neighbours, a stoic paramedic, wary nurses, and a procession of exhausted, cynical, sometimes downright uncooperative doctors forming the tragic and very human crux of it all. Like Kings and Queen, this is too enigmatic at large to qualify for distribution in New Zealand. All the more reason to see it in the here and now.—Tim Wong