Cinema has a default visual language for the apocalypse. The world will end with a spectacular bang brought to life by Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich. Cities will collapse in the blink of an eye. Ordinary people will step up as heroes. Our most powerful government agencies and corporate entities will do everything they can to help people. There can be some escapist fun in watching such spectacles play out. But are they accurate to reality? In reality, the apocalypse is happening all around us at a glacial pace. Climate change is slowly but surely making our planet uninhabitable. Economic gaps between the rich and the poor are getting larger. Our most powerful figures spout nonsense about "overpopulation" being the problem, rather than a handful of rich people wielding too many resources.
Once unthinkable status quo's (like people making a living through gig jobs) are now the standard. This is what the apocalypse looks like. A death by a thousand cuts. Filmmaker Radu Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World reflects this reality with incredibly biting satire. Sometimes, you have to laugh to stop from crying. So it is with this bleak comedy, which examines our apocalyptic status quo in ways that constantly ring true.
The first half of Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World focuses on the exploits of assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache), who is traveling around Bucharest to film candidates for a massive corporation's work safety video. Much like fellow 2024 film Problemista, Angela's exploits reflect how much running around is required to make a bare minimum living in the modern world. You're running around frantically like a headless chicken for paychecks you have to beg for. This section of the feature has a fascinating color palette, in which Angela's reality is framed in black-and-white. However, vivid color enters the film whenever we shift to the perspective of Angela filming herself (with a filter making her look like a man) as a parody of a right-wing Andrew Tate supporter. Color is also present in cutaways to footage from the 1981 Lucian Bratu motion picture Angela merge mai departe.
Much like Asteroid City, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World slathers "the real world" in colors divorced from reality. Heightened cutaways distorting reality, meanwhile, get all the vivid hues of everyday life. Asteroid City used this visual concept to explore how artists put so much of themselves into their works. Jude's latest directorial effort, meanwhile, takes these contrasting color schemes to paint a bleak picture of what's "real" in the modern world. 2024 is a realm disassociated from reality. Distorted news articles and fake social media accounts motivate people's paranoia of "the other." Fear Factor hosts are hailed as greater experts on medicine than doctors. Countries outright deny the existence of the genocides they're committing.
This phenomenon is reflected all throughout Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. Chiefly, the wealthy company Angela is working for wants to use carefully chosen testimony from disabled workers to absolve them of the blame for faulty workplace conditions. Meanwhile, other rich individuals featured in the movie constantly shift the blame away from phenomena like sacred graves getting intruded on or forests getting demolished for profit. These folks have the money and power to make the truth whatever they want it to be. This chilling notion informs where color comes into and out of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. Distortions or simulacrums of reality are now "viable" enough to warrant color. Reality is now whatever makes the 1% feel cozy. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge the working conditions someone like Angela goes through. Thus, her exploits (and the more realistic anti-corporate anecdotes from those disabled workers) are framed in monochromatic colors.
All the rich details one can wring from the presence or absence of color in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World speak volumes to the masterful filmmaking on display here. Just look at the precise details embedded in memorable early scenes, like a grotesque billboard hovering over Angela and her mother at a tombstone. This reminder of capitalism looms over people at their most emotionally vulnerable. Similarly evocative is a lengthy single-take where just the hands of Angela and a wealthy man are seen as they figure out who owns what land surrounding that cemetery. That latter dude is insistent (erroneously so) that they aren't in the wrong for intruding on the grave site. Temporary removal of on-screen humans emphasizes how aloof people are from taking responsibility for their actions. Plus, it's just darkly amusing to see a quietly terse conversation play out with just off-screen dialogue and wagging fingers.
It's thrilling to watch a movie so committed to its most offbeat visual impulses. That same dedication is also found Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World dives head-first into being superb searing satire. Just look at a lengthy sequence where Angela's higher-ups try to pick out the "proper" disabled worker to anchor their new work safety campaign. Here, we see supposedly "progressive" corporate vultures engaging in a deluge of ableist language and constantly finding economic reasons to erase Romani people from the campaign. It's such a disgusting display of smiling cruelty that could be lifted from any modern boardroom in the world. With this sequence, one sees the inevitable terrifying end result of treating human beings as a means to financial ends. The performances are pitch-perfect here and Jude's script reverberates with such palpable contempt for this behavior.
The future has arrived in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. What do we have to show for ourselves in this age of technological marvels? If this movie is any indication, mostly just lawsuits against corporations that will never end, cum-stained dresses, and lots of crosses on the side of the road. This bleak reality of the world circa. 2024 is expertly executed under the gifted filmmaking of Radu Jude. He balances authenticity and vivid visual flourishes all throughout this appropriately lengthy tour de force, right down to a lengthy single-take shot comprising the feature's entire second section. Oh, and on top of all that, Radu Jude also managed to squeeze in an on-screen appearance by Uwe Boll into a genuinely top-notch movie?!? Maybe miracles are still possible in this world...even during a slow-burn apocalypse.
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