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A humanitarian aid distribution center, a mild chaos of activity and people, all of them gathering up bags of food and supplies, loading them into SUVs, and heading off down mountain roads. It’s a public-facing show of altruism that gets laid down flat in Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean’s latest, “Întregalde,” an incisive, mirthlessly amusing satire about the social contours of charity.

The camera briefly settles on Bucharest aid workers Cristina (Carmen Lopazan) and Radu (a quick cameo from director Muntean), and just as quickly abandons them after a scene-setting conversation about grateful aid recipients and the moral quicksand of loving one’s own virtuousness.

The story then follows three volunteers who split off from the other two: easily irritated Dan, pragmatic Ilinca and earnest Maria. Once inside Dan’s Land Rover, they’re free to gossip about Radu and Cristina and the vacation home they’re buying.

The three are headed for Întregalde,...

"Immaculately subtle and fiendishly clever." Grasshopper Film has revealed the first official US trailer for a Romanian film titled Întregalde, which premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival last year. It played by in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar and picked up some great reviews at the fest, before hitting the Toronto, New York, and Vienna Film Festivals in the fall. A group on a humanitarian mission arrive in a remote area of Transylvania to offer the inhabitants various goods. Apart from a few quarrels and conflicts between the group members, everything seems to be going well for Maria and Dan. But soon after they stumble upon a disoriented local and try to help him, things go wrong... Starring Maria Popistasu, Ilona Brezoianu, Alex Bogdan, Luca Sabin, and Toma Cuzin. This is a strange trailer for the film, opening with the setup then jumping right into this scene where everything goes awry when the car gets stuck.

A lot gets lost in Radu Muntean’s fantastic “Întregalde.” Stuck in the mud as night falls in the thick of an increasingly sinister Romanian forest, people lose tempers, minds, control of their bowels, loyalties, ideals and maybe even a sense of themselves as decent, altruistic souls. But this uncannily gripping tragicomedy never loses your attention: Muntean, whose pedigree was established with 2010’s “Tuesday After Christmas,” but whose track record since has been more erratic than that of many of his Romanian New Wave peers, finds unexpectedly compelling new levels of scabrous humor and moving insight this time out. He is a filmmaker dynamically reborn amid the mulch and fallen leaves of the Transylvanian countryside, beside a stalled jeep that, like a Beckettian device, might be there but also might not.

In the back of the four-wheel-drive is Maria, who is riding with chatty, romantically frustrated Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu) and quick-tempered,...