‘You Don’t Belong Here’ Locarno Review: Toxic Masculinity In A Small Romanian Town

Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival, You Don’t Belong Here draws on the by-now-classic toolkit of contemporary Romanian cinema to tell a moral drama with as much literary as cinematic weight. Carrying the gravity of a Dostoevsky novel but set against the more mundane, everyday texture of small-town Romanian life, the new film from the director of If You Want to Whistle, Whistle follows a father and his teenage son as they navigate a deeply fraught family crisis with far-reaching social and political implications.

For much of the film, their stories unfold almost in parallel. In Reșița, a small city in Romania, lives Marius Călimănescu (Adrian Văncică), a widower, respected surgeon, and director of the local hospital, and his eighteen-year-old son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu), introverted, withdrawn, and seemingly none too bright. The inciting incident comes early: a group of racist youths plaster the cars of Roma families («gypsies,» they call them, bluntly and aggressively) with posters bearing the film’s title and slash their tires. During one of these attacks, a man comes out to confront them with a stick and is savagely beaten by the group.

While Marius is in surgery, the relatives of the man who died from the beating storm the hospital, tearing the place apart. In parallel, we see Ioan trying to hide his yellow bicycle — the one used in the crime — suggesting he had something to do with it. Gradually the two threads converge. But the film isn’t structured as a mystery to be solved, in the manner of a classic procedural; instead, it treats the crime as a given and uses it as a springboard to examine the behavior of both characters — the father, especially — and of the society they live in.

Through mostly static shots and long scenes, with digressive conversations and stretches of silence and restraint, the characters begin to absorb the consequences of what’s happened. We get to know Marius bit by bit: his friendship with the local police chief, his outlook on his work, his views on masculinity, and eventually — confiding in his girlfriend — his frustration at having a son who doesn’t live up to what he’d hoped for. «All he cares about is doing tricks on his bike,» he says, and this before he even knows what his son was involved in. Once the police get involved, roughly midway through, the man finds himself facing something far more troubling than mere disappointment. We’re given less access to Ioan’s inner life, but it becomes increasingly clear he was manipulated by his peers and is visibly rattled by what happened.

The familiar hallmarks of contemporary Romanian drama are all present, functioning almost as cinema-as-debate, not unlike the approach taken by Fjord, Cristian Mungiu’s recent Palme d’Or winner at Cannes — another film that hands the audience a «stinging» subject, blending family drama with sociopolitical material that feels ripped from the headlines. Unlike his colleague’s film, though, Serban’s is less manipulative and heavy-handed, more restrained and somber in its resonances. The film doesn’t just ask what a father should do upon learning what his son has done — it asks what kind of father he’s been for something like this to happen in the first place. Isn’t there, in that act, a reflection of himself, of the way he raised him?

Serban rarely strays from the traditional Romanian dramatic form — except in the ending, which turns somewhat more heightened, as does an interior-monologue scene earlier on — and with these tools he draws the viewer for over 150 minutes into the slow but steadily mounting collapse of this small family unit. Along the way, You Don’t Belong Here speaks to patriarchy, police corruption, racism, and simmering social violence that runs across generations. Like the series Adolescence, but adapted to the rhythms, tones, and pacing of a more observational, contemplative brand of cinema, Florin Serban’s film ends up being a precise, deeply uncomfortable study of the different toxic forms masculinity can take.