‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ Review: Radu Jude’s Brilliantly Bizarre Work-Culture Satire Won’t Quit (But Maybe You Should)

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang Nobody can be both the magnifying glass and the ant burning up under its glare. Nobody, that is, except shaggy Romanian shaman Radu Jude who, with his Locarno competition entry “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” follows up 2021’s Berlinale-winning “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” with a dizzying, dazzling feat of social critique, an all-fronts-at-once attack on the zeitgeist, and a mischievous, often hilarious work of art about the artifice of work.

Funny and furious, crude and subtle, unkempt and thoroughly disciplined, this deranged movie is also maybe the sanest film of the year: a multifaceted manifesto exposing the absurd internalized fallacy that one must work in order to live, when it’s work — as in, the pitiless daily grind — that will be the death of us all.

Life is short but art is long, the saying goes. And at two hours 43 minutes, “Do Not Expect…” is indeed long, divided into two lopsided chapters and so replete with provocative ideas that any given five-minute segment could emit enough intellectual energy to initiate fission in a small nuclear reactor.

Its anarchic approach, full of digressions and addenda and footnotes that refuse to stay underfoot, is immediately apparent, with the first, longer chapter called “a dialogue” with 1981 film “Angela Moves On,” directed by Lucian Bratu, starring Dorina Lazar as a Bucharest taxi driver.