Your Company
 

Beyond the Hills(După dealuri)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Romania, France, Belgium · 2012
2h 30m
Director Cristian Mungiu
Starring Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuta, Dana Tapalaga
Genre Drama, Romance

A drama centered on the friendship between two young women who grew up in the same orphanage; one has found refuge at a convent in Romania and refuses to leave with her friend, who now lives in Germany.

Stream Beyond the Hills

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

25

Film.com by

Assisted by passionless central performances and dull dialogue, Mungiu succeeds only in exhausting our patience, not in conveying a message.

75

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Mungiu's method creates the feeling of being submerged in a maze of confrontations and chatter, but the build-up gets so tiring that the concluding scenes come as a relief instead of a payoff.

60

Variety by Justin Chang

Observing the situation at an icy remove, Beyond the Hills never builds the palpable menace and pressure-cooker anxiety of "4 Months," and its dramatic progression feels obvious, even predictable, by comparison.

80

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

As in his much-lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the latest feature from Palme d’Or–winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu takes a rigorous approach to the material. But where the previous film — about two women seeking a back-alley abortion — was a reductively dour slog, Beyond the Hills feels more caustically all-encompassing.

83

The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth

Deceivingly complex, with an emotional center that peels away like an onion the longer it unfolds, this is a powerful effort from Mungiu in which love and faith are both different kinds of poison.

80

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Enthralling, mysterious and intimately upsetting – a terrible demonstration of how poverty creates a space which irrational fear must fill.

90

Village Voice by Scott Foundas

The haunting final image suggests how quickly such stories can be lost...which makes Beyond the Hills, above all else, a powerful and necessary act of reclamation.

80

Total Film by Tom Dawson

Arduous yet always absorbing, Cristian Mungiu’s first full-length feature since 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is inspired by a real-life case of a tragically botched exorcism in rural Romania.

Users who liked this film also liked