The Greatest Romanian Film You Have Never Heard Of Is on Prime Video Right Now and You Are Running Out of Time to Watch It

Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is not a film about dying. It is a film about what a society reveals about itself in the specific way it treats a man who is dying — and what it reveals about Romanian society in 2005 is so precisely observed that it feels, in 2025, like a film about everywhere.

Here is what happens in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. An elderly man living alone in Bucharest begins to feel unwell on a Saturday night. He calls an ambulance. The ambulance arrives. He is taken to a hospital. The hospital sends him to another hospital. That hospital sends him to another. This continues for approximately two and a half hours of screen time.

That is the film. There is no twist. There is no redemption. There is no moment where the system corrects itself and the man is treated with the dignity his situation requires. The film simply follows Mr. Lazarescu — who is drunk, who is sick, who has liver cancer that nobody has diagnosed yet, who is alone in the world in the specific way that old people who have outlived their relationships are alone — through a single night in which the Romanian healthcare system demonstrates, with the precision of a controlled experiment, its complete indifference to his survival.

Cristi Puiu shot the film in something close to real time, with a handheld camera that never leaves Mr. Lazarescu's side, and the effect is not the manufactured authenticity of the Dogme movement or the performed naturalism of much contemporary social realist cinema. It is something harder and more uncomfortable — the feeling of actually being present in a situation you cannot fix, watching a human being treated as an inconvenience by people who are not monsters but who have simply stopped seeing him as a person.

The medical professionals in this film are not villains. This is the film's most disturbing choice. They are tired, overworked, professionally callous in the way that people in demanding jobs become professionally callous when the system they work within provides no alternative. The nurse who accompanies Mr. Lazarescu through the night — played by Luminita Gheorghiu in a performance of extraordinary, quiet moral complexity — is the film's moral centre precisely because she is the only person in the system who continues to see him. She cannot save him. She stays with him anyway.

Puiu made this film for almost nothing. It was shot in real hospitals, with mostly unknown actors, over a period of months in which he and his cinematographer developed a visual language of radical proximity — the camera always at human height, always moving at human speed, always seeing exactly as much as a person physically present in the room would see. The result is a film that feels less like cinema than like evidence.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is the first film of what Puiu called the Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs — a projected series of films about ordinary Romanian life after communism. Only two have been completed so far, which means this film carries more weight than a first film in a series normally carries. It is simultaneously the introduction to a project and the fullest expression of a cinematic philosophy.

That philosophy is simple and almost impossibly demanding: show what actually happens. Do not cut away from it. Do not provide the audience with emotional distance. Do not explain, contextualise, redeem, or resolve. Show what actually happens and trust the audience to understand what they are seeing.

The film is two and a half hours long. It is the longest two and a half hours you will spend watching a film this year in the sense that it will feel like actually living through a night, actually watching a man die, actually being unable to help. It is also the most important two and a half hours you will spend watching a film this year for exactly the same reason.

It is on Prime Video. It has almost no visibility on the platform. The thumbnail gives nothing away. Most people who subscribe to Prime Video do not know it exists.

You know now. Watch it this week before you watch anything else.

Currently streaming on Prime Video India By Republic of Cinema

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