One Floor Below
In this slow-burn thriller from Romanian director Radu Muntean, a bourgeois family man is left with a moral conundrum
Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below continues the vaunted tradition of the Romanian New Wave’s emphasis on the quotidian realities of existence, but this time that brave commitment to naturalism turns what is nominally a slow-burn thriller into something decidedly more tepid. In a performance imbued with just the right quiet pathos (it really is the whole film), Teodor Corban stars as Sandu, a bourgeois family man who runs a vehicle registration business with his wife when not haranguing his video-game-obsessed teenage son or doting on his beloved dog.
After Sandu overhears a heated argument between a single female and a married male neighbour in her downstairs flat, the young woman is found murdered. He tells the cops nothing, but that doesn’t stop the man (who saw Sandu witness the argument) from uncomfortably insinuating himself into Sandu’s life and family. Mauntean attempts to examine hard truths about ideological compromise and masculine insecurity, but Sandu’s ethical conundrum doesn’t really feel like one at all. Muntean’s summary disavowal of genre tropes also takes a lot of sting out of the film’s pulpy central premise. When confrontation finally ensues, it seems like too little, too late.
One Floor Below screened at Glasgow Film Festival.
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