THE OTHER IRENE

By day, Aurel sleeps. At night, he does his lonely watchman’s patrols in a Bucharest shopping centre, one of the living dead in the midst of a frozen, clinically clean consumer world. Like an extra pushed onto the set with instructions on how to behave, the young man goes about the business of his life with no word of complaint. When his wife Irina, whom he loves with simple, child-like adoration, takes on a temporary job in Cairo, he carries on as before, mechanically, infinitely lonely. Long before Aurel gets suspicious, the viewer knows that trouble is round the corner. And sure enough, it soon looks like the hero has stumbled onto the tracks of a mysterious crime … In Andrei Gruzsniczki’s austerly composed, suspenseful and deeply moving film, not a single detail is superfluous.