Scarred Hearts

It's the rare page-to-screen adaptation in which the camera becomes an essential character.

Despite the film's bleak premise, writer-director Radu Jude finds dark humor within the certainty of death.

Hearts hardly develops a pulse, hiding the faces of the protagonists in immobile medium and wide shots while any possible emotions get snowed under by non-contextualized intellectual musings and socio-politico-historical details.

At two and a quarter hours, Scarred Hearts recalls the miserable overlong 2005 Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.