General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii) is a 2023 Romanian satirical comedy film written and directed by Radu Jude, in which an overworked production assistant in Bucharest films a workplace safety video for a multinational corporation while venting her frustration through a misogynistic TikTok alter ego¹^•². It premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize, and it was selected as Romania's submission for the 2024 Academy Awards³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Radu Jude, a Golden Bear winner (for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, 2021)²
Original title	Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii, an aphorism of the Polish writer Stanisław Jerzy Lec, also quoted by Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum³
Runtime and language	163 minutes (2h 43m); Romanian dialogue¹
Production	Romania, Croatia, France, and Luxembourg; producers Ada Solomon and Adrian Sitaru¹
Awards	Special Jury Prize at Locarno; Romania's submission for the 2024 Oscars³^•⁴
Critical reception	95% on the Tomatometer from 83 reviews; 69% on the Popcornmeter from 50+ user ratings²
US release	Limited theatrical release March 15, 2024, distributed by MUBI; gross USA $74.0K²

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The film follows Angela, a production assistant on a zero-hours contract (Job with no guaranteed hours; central to Angela's precarity) who is assigned to drive around Bucharest auditioning workers injured in workplace accidents for a corporate safety-at-work video commissioned by a multinational company⁵^•⁶. Exhausted by 16-hour workdays, she often struggles to stay awake at the wheel of her Fiat, which the camera films from the front seat in high-contrast black and white⁵.

Between errands she posts profane TikTok and Instagram rants in the guise of her avatar Bobiță, an Andrew Tate-style influencer created with a glitchy filter that transforms her into a monobrowed misogynist; she describes the method as "criticism by way of extreme caricature"⁵^•⁷.

In the film's second part, the accident victim chosen as the video's case study reveals on camera that his injury resulted from the company's negligence, and the statement ignites a scandal; the company then forces him to reinvent his story to suit its narrative⁶^•². The BFI program notes identify this character as Ovidiu, played by Ovidiu Pîrșan⁵, while the Fandango synopsis names him Marian⁶.

Ending

The film closes with a roughly 40-minute epilogue¹. The RogerEbert.com review describes the culmination as an unbroken shot, ostensibly the raw footage of the safety video, in which a poor family is manipulated into undermining their own interests⁹.

The 1981 film and the doubled Angela

A second Angela. Jude repeatedly intersperses color footage from Lucian Bratu's 1981 Romanian film Angela Moves On (Angela merge mai departe), whose taxi-driving protagonist is also named Angela, often slowing the clips down or zooming in to examine their more filmic texture⁵^•³. He takes over two actors from Bratu's film, Dorina Lazăr and László Miske, along with their characters, and when the older Angela tells the present-day Angela her love story, fragments of the older film serve as flashbacks³. The structure connects the two Angelas when Lazăr turns out to be the mother of the semi-paralyzed accident victim, layering fact and fiction, past and present, celluloid and digital, communism and capitalism⁵.

In an interview, Jude said he started from real stories rather than a sociological analysis of work in Romania, but that the feeling of the film came from how many people recognized themselves in this very insecure way of working⁴.

Cast and production

Ilinca Manolache plays Angela and her alter ego Bobiță; Nina Hoss plays Doris Goethe, the head of marketing at the Austrian corporation commissioning the video, presented as the "grandgrand-granddaughter" of Goethe and first seen as a disembodied head in a Zoom session; Ovidiu Pîrșan, Dorina Lazăr, László Miske, and Uwe Boll also appear²^•⁵^•⁶. When Jude approached Lazăr to act in the film, she agreed on the condition that she bring her avatar along⁷.

The film is Jude's tenth feature³. Marius Panduru was the director of photography and Cătălin Cristuțiu the editor¹.

Themes

At its core, the film examines work and how it is exploited: the production assistant's grueling schedule, injured employees whose mishaps supply material for public relations, and the corporate apparatus that turns pain into a safety message⁸. By tying the present day to a 1981 relic of Romania's last socialist years, the film turns historical era into a theme of its own, contending that labor continues to be extracted under very different economic systems.⁸

Jude alludes to different forms of technology throughout the film, from livestreams to TikTok, including a line in which a Romanian video director tells his Austrian boss they can now "crop and make things look as we like" by filming on 8K⁷.

Two interludes extend the satire into documentary territory. Angela's own grandparents lie buried under Bucharest, and their graves are to be dug up in a forced exhumation to make way for the expansion of a hotel complex, carried out, Angela is assured, "by the book". Late in the film, after Angela mentions an over-trafficked stretch of highway outside the city, the action pauses for a mute, five-minute montage of roadside grave markers⁵.

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 95% Tomatometer from 83 reviews, with 79 fresh and 4 rotten, and an average of rated reviews of 8.40/10; the critics consensus calls it "as unique and breathlessly expansive as its title"². Adam Nayman of The Ringer wrote that, despite the art-house aesthetics and nearly three-hour running time, "this is what a killer comedy looks like in 2024"².

In Romania, the film drew far fewer cinema admissions than Jude's previous feature Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which had won the Golden Bear, even though the new film screened without pandemic-era restrictions; the Romanian film critic Mihai Fulger suggested that a Berlinale trophy counted for more with Romanian audiences than a Swiss festival prize³.

References

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