General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Beyond the Hills

Beyond the Hills (Romanian: După dealuri) is a 2012 drama directed by the Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, in which Alina, a young woman working in Germany, returns to Romania to persuade her childhood friend Voichita, now a novice nun in an isolated Orthodox convent, to leave with her, a request that ends in an exorcism and death. The film premiered in competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Screenplay and a shared Best Actress award for its two leads, and it was Romania's official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	După dealuri; directed and written by Cristian Mungiu¹
Production	Romania, France, Belgium, 2012; 155 minutes; Romanian language¹
Source	Inspired by the non-fiction novels of Tatiana Niculescu Bran and a 2005 case of alleged demonic possession in Romania's Moldova region³
Lead roles	Cristina Flutur as Alina, Cosmina Stratan as Voichita, Valeriu Andriuta as the priest¹
Cannes 2012	Best Screenplay; Best Actress shared by Flutur and Stratan²
Oscar entry	Romania's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film, 85th Academy Awards (2013)²
Reception	91% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (107 reviews); Metascore 79; IMDb rating 7.5/10⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Story

Alina (Cristina Flutur) and Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) grew up together in an orphanage, where the short-tempered Alina protected her more delicate friend. After several years working in Germany, Alina travels to a remote Orthodox convent in Romania to bring Voichita back with her. Voichita, who has found refuge in faith and a family among the nuns and their priest, known as Papa (Valeriu Andriuta), refuses to leave. When Alina challenges the priest in an attempt to win back Voichita's affection, her escalating distress is interpreted by the community as demonic possession, setting in motion the interventions that end her life.³^•⁶

The AFI FEST synopsis describes the community's reading of events directly: the Orthodox community interprets Alina's thirst for freedom as a demonic spirit threatening their austere life, and by the film's end Voichita may have found escape not from the spirit but from the memories of a romantic past with Alina.⁷ The film is not a supernatural thriller; it is, in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's description, a portrait of dogma at odds with personal liberty in a society still emerging from the shadow of Communism.³

Real events behind the film

The screenplay draws on a real case that attracted international media attention in 2005: the death of a young woman during an exorcism at a small monastery in Moldavia, near Mungiu's hometown. According to the Criterion essay by Doru Pop, a scholar of film, the real young woman's name was Maricica Irina Cornici, and the film is based on two nonfiction novels by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, a former BBC reporter.⁶ A 2026 Le Monde article identifies the location as the Tanacu monastery.⁸ Mungiu himself has said the story is about the freedom of choice of people born into a social context where one is doomed to fail, and that his purpose was not to investigate religious facts but to question the limits of free will in the face of social constraints.⁹

Style and interpretation

Mungiu shot the film in long, austere takes and natural light, refusing to demonize either the desperate visitor or the well-meaning religious community whose dogma proves catastrophic; the tragedy is located in incomprehension rather than villainy.¹⁰ Nick Roddick, writing in Sight and Sound, notes that the film is structured around the idea of place, contrasting Romania with Germany as the locus of flight and freedom, and the town with the isolated monastery, first seen looming on the horizon in a tracking shot as the two women approach it. He also observes that the temptation to make the women straightforward victims is avoided: Alina comes across as surly and confrontational, Voichita as genuinely comfortable in her faith.¹¹

Doru Pop argues that the film goes beyond social criticism of dysfunctional post-Communist institutions, plunging the viewer into the world of the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and the helpless in the face of institutions including the monastery, hospitals, the police, and social services.⁶ Critics at the time read it in similar terms: Manohla Dargis of The New York Times described a film exploring the push and pull between the collective and the individual, between faith and free will.²

Reception and controversy

The film premiered at Cannes in May 2012, where Flutur and Stratan, both screen newcomers, shared the Best Actress prize and Mungiu received the Best Screenplay award. It also played at the 2012 Toronto and New York film festivals.² It later won Best Film at the Mar del Plata Film Festival and the Special Prize of the Jury at the Gijón Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Screenplay at the European Film Awards.¹² On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 91% Tomatometer from 107 reviews and an 81% audience score; Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 79 based on 33 critic reviews, and its IMDb rating stands at 7.5/10 from about 14,000 votes.⁴^•⁵^•¹³

Within Romania, the public response was unexpectedly positive; the East European Film Bulletin notes it was one of the few Romanian films that had moviegoers standing in line for a ticket.⁹ Institutional reaction was harsher. Representatives of the Orthodox Church, the country's dominant religious denomination, attacked the film as anticlerical and even denigratory, and some officials accused Mungiu of ideologically deforming reality, promoting Western values by portraying a lesbian relationship, and falsifying the events depicted. Doru Pop counters that the priest's negative opinions about the West and his denunciation of sexual liberties are ideas regularly promoted by church media, and that the nuns and priest as Mungiu presents them are never caricatured but fully humanized and contextualized.⁶

Production and release

Mungiu produced the film through his company Mobra Films in coproduction with Why Not Productions, Wild Bunch, Les Films du Fleuve, France 3 Cinéma, and Mandragora Movies Romania, with backing from Eurimages and the MEDIA Programme; in Romania it was distributed by Mungiu's own company, Voodoo Films.¹^•¹⁴ Oleg Mutu was the director of photography, Mircea Olteanu the editor, and Calin Papura and Mihaela Poenaru the production designers.¹

The film opened in Romania on 26 October 2012 and was sold to 38 territories, including France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, South Korea, and Japan.¹⁴ Roddick places the story's setting sometime after the introduction of the euro in 1999 but before Romania's entry into the European Union in 2007.¹¹

Place in Mungiu's career

Beyond the Hills was Mungiu's third feature. His first, Occident, premiered at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes; his second, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2007.⁷ The film confirmed Mungiu as a central figure of the Romanian New Wave, a movement characterized by patient observation and unresolved difficulty, and critics have compared his approach to that of spiritually inclined directors such as Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky.¹⁰^•¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2010 to 2014 › Psychological and social drama films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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