NYFF: "Întregalde" Slashes Old Habits For Something Fresh

by Jason Adams

Tell me if you've heard this one before -- a group of young people get lost in the woods. They pick up a stranger, and he's acting really weird. They lose their phone signals because of how remote they are in the wilderness. Their car breaks down. The group starts separating, one by one. Even more strange-behaving men show up. There are tales of an abandoned building in the mist-shrouded woods, and everybody starts wandering around trying to find it. One of them falls and hurts their leg. Night falls and their flashlight beams scatter in the darkness, no safe haven in sight. Snow begins to fall on a mysterious little shack. 

If you think I've just described the latest schlock horror flick to hit movie theater screens I wouldn't blame you, but this is actually the latest serious-minded art-house film from Romanian director Radu Muntean (Tuesday, After Christmas), who proves that there's nothing more enlivening than watching somebody serious-minded renegotiate the same old same old elements into something new, strange, and hypnotic. Întregalde is a low-key astonishment.

You can see the warning signs accumulating early on... as a group of well-meaning aid workers drive around the Transylvanian -- yes, I said Transylvanian -- hills and countryside, moving from one place to another picking up food and clothing which they will then distribute to the poor people living even more isolated off the grid, in the barren villages scattered around this nondescript place. Tensions flare between couples, and characters keep swapping cars in unnerving patterns, as if we're privy to a game of Musical Chairs where what waits these people when the music stops is lord knows what. It can't be good though!

Muntean skillfully makes these mundane moments thrum with tension, shooting the long driving sequences between distant places through with Those Shots, You Know The Ones, the ones where we the audience have been trained to expect a collision, a disaster of some kind. His camera hovers at that angle that's just wrong, with just enough of the outside-the-car in view,  and he has his distracted drivers paying far too little attention to the winding, muddy roads they're bearing down. It's impossible to not find yourself on the edge of your seat even before anything's even happened.

And then the events I detailed in the opening paragraph begin falling into place, and anybody who's ever seen a single horror film knows to place themselves on high wide red alert. A muttering old man is standing in the middle of the road and the gang decides to give him a ride. These are good decent kind young people, out here doing good deeds, and he needs their help after all. But aye, there's that rub -- it's not that these sorts of horror films are always stuffed to the gills with total assholes. I know the horror nerds out there, amongst which I count myself, could rattle off half a dozen Slasher casts who aren't solely concerned with Drugs & Sex above all else. 

But they're outliers, and they're the outliers that prove the rule -- it's not typical, these do-gooders here in Întregalde. And you could say Muntean's unraveling of our expectations probably begins right there and then, unfolding outward from that first kernel. This film glad-hands all of the tools of the horror movie trade, using them for the inherent tension they drag along with them, and then mashes and molds them to fit his own path straight past old haunts. The film walks in footsteps laid out in the snow already, but with its feet sideways, showing us the whole dang thing from a new angle. Turns out that Întregalde isn't really a horror film at all, but you can't tell that to your mind as it's messing with you every step as you experience it. And every question the film poses yanks its answer back at the last moment -- it's an endless surprise somehow, a revelation assembled from familiar patterns. You think you know but you have no idea, and blessings upon us for it.