DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Mubi

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2024

The main takeaway of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is that we're all in big trouble. Then again, we've always been in trouble, because living depends upon working and most jobs don't care if you have a life, most employers don't care what happens to you, and most companies only care about their bottom line. Writer/director Radu Jude's film follows a gig worker as she exhausts herself to do everything her boss asks of her, and it just so happens that her current task is interviewing people who were severely injured on the job for doing the same thing.

Despite that simple summary, the film is a lot. It's a nearly three-hour satirical exposé of the modern world—even though it's set in Romania—that appraises the present on its own terms and by comparison to the past, involves social media and all sorts of cultural references, is something of a gig-worker odyssey, and finds the absurdities of things as obvious as a corporation trying to protect itself from blatant wrongdoing and as existentially despairing as a scene that shows how death doesn't even protect one's earthly remains from corruption. This is not the sort of film with a clear plot, but that just allows Jude to take his scattershot approach to comedy to any target he can imagine.

In other words, the film works because it is a lot, makes us feel the slog of a repetitive life lived for work, and gets us thinking about all the ways so many various parties can screw us on a daily basis and continue to do so even after we're dead. It's not pleasant, but it is funny in a dreadfully honest way.

Our protagonist is Angela Raducani (Ilinca Manolache), who wakes up one morning, gets dressed, and starts off on a journey across the country for her job. She's a production assistant for a little film company, currently low on resources and personnel because some foreign filmmaker is using most of them for a production (The identity of that filmmaker won't be revealed here, but those who know shlocky, low-budget movies will recognize the name—and be rather amused when Angela shows up on the director's set eventually). This means Angela has to do the work of several people, because the company's big project is a workplace-safety educational video for an international furniture company based in Austria. It's a lucrative contract.

They want a former employee who was injured at work to give a testimonial about the incident and to encourage current workers to wear helmets and any other required safety equipment on the job. This means Angela spends her day traveling from candidate to candidate, auditioning for the role like it's some kind of competition for misery. She listens to people who worked overtime and without pay, whose complaints were ignored, and who ended up scarred and/or partially paralyzed because terrible working conditions are going to have terrible consequences eventually.

The irony, of course, is that Angela is working extra hours, not being paid what she's owed, being ignored by her boss when she notes how little she has slept, and in a prime position for something awful to happen if, say, she falls asleep at the wheel while driving around to listen to these stories. That's essentially the little bit of plot that exists here.

The rest of the film is listening to these stories, told by real people (The character who's selected for the job is played by an actor with the same name, for example), and watching as Angela tries to have something—anything—approaching a life outside of work. One of her current favorite past times is recording videos for social media, playing an awful man named "Bobita," who presents himself as a world-traveler looking for women to demean and spouting all sorts of nonsense. She calls the performance extreme satire, although at least one of her co-workers points out that some people might mistake it for authentic beliefs.

All of this makes the narrative an episodic one, with each episode revealing some gag or repeated point about human life as a kind of commodity—or corpses an unanticipated cost when Angela discovers that her grandparents' remains will be have to moved, because the cemetery moved on to some housing unit's private property. One of the recurring ideas here is Jude's incorporation of footage from a Romanian film from 1981 about a woman cab driver who's also named Angela.

The juxtaposition of the earlier Angela's experiences with our contemporary one reveals how little has changed for such workers (Dorina Lazar, who starred in that earlier film, appears here as the character in the present day, still struggling because taxi drivers weren't provided a pension) but how much has changed in Romania. One of the more haunting moments here has Angela driving through an area that used to be a neighborhood and the cab driver actually driving through that neighborhood, about year before it was demolished for an autocrat's ego.

The climax of this is decidedly, intentionally anticlimactic, as Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss), a marketing executive for the furniture company, arrives to miss the filming of the safety video (not before revealing how little she thinks of or cares about anything, even her own family's literary legacy). Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World ends with the shooting of that video, in a lengthy sequence that's wickedly funny about corporate apathy, surprisingly suspenseful once we realize the stakes for the video's subject, and a fine summation of the cynical reality of people as resources to be used.

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