General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Police, Adjective

Police, Adjective (Romanian: Polițist, adjectiv) is a 2009 Romanian drama directed and written by Corneliu Porumboiu, in which a young plainclothes policeman refuses to arrest a teenager who offers hashish to classmates, and is forced by his superior to read dictionary definitions of the words at issue. It won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and is regarded as a characteristic work of the Romanian New Wave.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Polițist, adjectiv; working title Intermediar (Intermediate)¹^•²
Director and writer	Corneliu Porumboiu, his second feature after 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)¹^•³
Principal cast	Dragoș Bucur (Cristi), Vlad Ivanov (Anghelache), Ion Stoica (Nelu), Irina Saulescu (Anca)¹
Length and format	115 minutes, shot on 35mm in Romanian¹^•⁴
Key award	Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, Cannes 2009¹
US release	IFC Films, limited theatrical release 23 December 2009; US gross $48.3K⁵
Critical scores	Metascore 81 ("universal acclaim", 23 reviews); Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 79%⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Cristi (Dragoș Bucur) is a young police detective in a provincial Romanian city, assigned to follow a high-school student, Victor, who was denounced by an informer for supplying hashish to classmates.⁴^•³ Cristi has trailed the boy for days and concluded that he smokes marijuana with friends but is not a dealer; under Romanian law, however, "offering" the drug is itself punishable, and a conviction could carry a sentence of eight to fifteen years.¹^•⁷

Cristi's superiors and the prosecutor want an arrest and a sting operation that would pressure the boy into denouncing his supplier. Cristi resists: he believes the law will soon change, he has heard that Romanian authorities are expected to relax narcotics laws, and he does not want the ruin of a young man he considers merely irresponsible on his conscience.¹^•⁸ His stalling jeopardizes his career and draws the suspicion of his superiors.⁵

The dictionary scene

The film culminates in a confrontation in the office of Captain Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov), who demands to know why the stakeout has produced no results. When Cristi says he cannot continue the case in good conscience, Anghelache has a secretary bring a dictionary and makes Cristi read out the definitions of "conscience", "morality", "law", "state", and finally "police", applying them literally to the assignment.⁹^•³ The scene, played in long takes with Anghelache soft-spoken and unbending, ends in victory for the senior officer, and Cristi returns to duty.⁹^•¹⁰

The title comes from this scene: the last definition read out is of the word "police", and the first sense given is adjectival, describing a type of movie.³^•¹¹ Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, noted that the Cannes posters read "Politist, adjective" with a period and a gun on top of a dictionary, and that in Romanian, as in French, "police" is properly a noun.⁷

Language and style

Porumboiu has described the film as being about words. He linked it to his first feature, 12:08 East of Bucharest, saying that if that film was a collage of definitions of the word "revolution", Police, Adjective went through a process of trying to define the word "conscience".¹²^•¹³ Language runs through the film in smaller registers as well: Cristi debates with his wife Anca, a teacher, over the meaning of romantic song lyrics, and she corrects his grammar, telling him that the Romanian Academy's verdict is final on matters of linguistic usage.¹¹^•¹⁴

Formally, the film is a deliberately slowed-down police procedural. Long, nearly wordless takes follow Cristi on foot as he trails the teenagers, waits, and writes reports; insert shots pan down his handwritten surveillance reports, which record that "nothing happened for two hours".⁹^•¹⁴ Porumboiu said he chose to look "in an almost clinical way" at a police procedural and the way cops react, following Cristi the way Cristi follows his suspects.¹⁵ Critics read the film as turning the genre on its head, sapping the central crime of significance while accentuating the mundane steps of solving it, so that protocol and hierarchy displace the police's service to society.²^•¹⁶

Origins and production

Porumboiu drew on two sources: a newspaper story about a man arrested for dealing hashish after his brother reported him to the police, and a conversation with a friend who was a policeman and described a case he did not want to solve for fear of later qualms of conscience.¹² The film was produced by 42 Km Film with Porumboiu as producer, photographed by Marius Panduru and edited by Roxana Szel.¹ It premiered internationally on 15 May 2009 and opened in Romania on 3 July 2009, drawing 2,504 admissions in its first weekend.¹⁷

Reception

The film won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes 2009 and later took six Gopo Awards in Romania from ten nominations.¹^•⁵ On Metacritic it scored 81 based on 23 critic reviews, with 91 percent positive, and reviewers singled out the dictionary scene as a source of genuine suspense.⁵ Reception was not uniform: Time Out called it "shockingly dull", and the Slant Magazine critic Andrew Schenker judged the final semantic discussion an overblown thesis statement welded to an otherwise impressive procedural.⁵^•¹⁸ The critic J. Hoberman placed it third on his top ten list for 2009, calling it "a philosophical crime film that, as the investigation of an investigation, substitutes irony for suspense".¹⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2005–2009 films › Released 2008 to 2009

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

Notice something wrong?