Metacritic reviews

Over a difficult three-hour sprawl, Cristi Puiu's Aurora fully explores the time before and after a killer strikes, and it has the cumulative effect of making what passes for a "motive" seem absurdly simplistic.

A quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.

A slow burn thriller taken to the extreme, Cristi Puiu's Aurora continues the Romanian writer-director's obsession with time as his main narrative device.

The film takes its time detailing his mundane activities, often withholding the kind of information audiences usually expect, and it's Puiu's talent to transform it all into a highly disturbing portrait - both of an individual and a society.

Call it a mental workout that (although considerably less arduous than reading Sartre) some might find exhausting and others exhilarating. Aurora is not a movie to make you glad that you exist; it's a movie that makes you aware that you do.

What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?

Maddeningly mundane, this Romanian drama aims for an antiseptic look at random violence and, unfortunately, achieves it.

Puiu offers zero insight into his character; only suckers will find the pose artful or nourishing. Skip it.