Mungiu's Ambiguity As a Method: Between Moral Plea and Political Incorrectness

Yet at Cannes, he offered a less consensual interpretation of his film, saying there are too many "politically correct" films and that art has lost the freedom to think against the dominant ideology — a pressure he compared to communist ideology, which "knew better than citizens. He specified that his film's subject is "left-wing fundamentalism. Pirvulescu contends that between the humanist plea and the attack on political correctness, one must choose — or admit that ambiguity is Mungiu's method, one that forms a system.

In "Beyond the Hills" (2012), Mungiu drew from the true story of a young novice who died in 2005 during an exorcism in a monastery in Tanacu, Romania, to probe religious fanaticism. In R.M.N. (2022), he evoked the case of Ditrau, a Transylvanian village stirred against Sri Lankan workers, exploring the mechanisms of ordinary xenophobia.