‘Blaga’s Lessons’ Review: A Victim Turns Venal In a Bitterly Potent Social Thriller From Bulgaria

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic In one fell swoop, 70-year-old widow Blaga Naumova goes from being cash-strapped to cash-stripped. All her life, she’s carefully pinched pennies to accumulate a modest cushion of life savings that she’s nonetheless never been sensible enough to put in the bank; decades of scrimping amount to naught when, in a moment of terrorized madness, she caves to the threats of a phone scammer and quite literally throws her very small fortune out the window.

How could you be so stupid, everyone asks her, and many in the audience are likely to echo them. But Stephan Komandarev’s damning, despairing, riveting thriller “Blaga’s Lessons” sees things another way: In a post-communist Bulgaria where women like Blaga are legally bled dry by cowboys and corrupt institutions on all sides, how is she supposed to see the difference?

Premiering in the main competition at Karlovy Vary, this is tense, tough-minded fare that isn’t afraid to test the bounds of realism for the sake of a good story, but nonetheless feels authentically rooted in an ailing, neglected strand of Bulgarian society.

Like much of Komandarev’s work, it marries a stern social conscience to a crowdpleasing flair for genre — at least until a bluntly provocative denouement that will divide viewers along “what would you do” lines.