The film starts with Alina (Cristina Flutur) visiting her best friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), who moved from the orphanage they both grew up in to a convent run by the somewhat ominous Mama and Papa. Alina tries to convince Voichita to leave the convent with her; when she refuses, Alina elects to stay despite her minimal religious faith and problems with authority.
It's an interesting set-up that then devolves into a second act that is, to put it bluntly, boring. There are several eye-catching elements that director Cristian Mungiu introduces—Alina's hinted-at schizophrenia, a history of sexual abuse at the orphanage where Alina and Voichita were raised, something mysterious with Alina's confession—but it's all abandoned by the wayside. The movie mentions these things and then moves on, electing instead to focus on shot after shot of the grey, oppressive visual landscape of the convent and Alina's fruitless quest to get Voichita to leave the place that has become her home.
Wait, did I say this movie was brilliant? It is. You just have to bear with it.
Near the end of the film something happens, something that forever changes the lives of Voichita and everyone else at the convent. And you, in the audience, feel that visceral shock as well because you, like Voichita, have been trapped in the convent with her, observing but unable to change the events around you.
It reminds me of something a friend said about Michae Haneke's Amour: It's best to see it in a theater because you really need to be captive to it. You need to be trapped in the apartment with that old man and his dying wife. They can't leave or take a quick Twitter break. You shouldn't be able to, either.
The same is true of Beyond the Hills. We are forced to share the characters' ceaseless monotony, so we truly feel the impact when when it goes away. Mungiu doesn't make it easy for his audience—watching Beyond the Hills is not a fun experience, and there are no concessions to some typical Hollywood notion of how films should be constructed.
It all comes to a head in the final scene, where two new characters, outsiders (and how strange it is to see outsiders after nearly two hours of feeling isolated in the convent!), have a chat about the weather, of all things. How they wish the winter would end soon—but the snow will have messed up the roads—but that's just the way it is, there's nothing you can do about it—yeah, but it's still bad. This mundane conversation encapsulates the theme of the film: The world sucks, but there's really nothing to be done about it.
(Like I said: Not a fun film.)
Not only brilliant in its construction, Beyond the Hills is visually amazing, too. The look of the film is as monotonous as its story at times, with the bleak convent placed center-stage and characters often shot from behind, so you see the backs of their heads instead of their faces in what would otherwise be very emotional scenes. But then, in a few scenes, the monotony breaks, and you get Voichita, the only spot of light in a sea of dark nuns' robes, breaking free from the film's emotional repression and expressing sadness, confusion, fear. It's brilliant acting from Strahan, added to by the way the scenes—the film as a whole!—are shot.
The acting, the cinematography, the structure: Everything in Beyond the Hills comes together by the end to form a masterfully constructed vision of hopelessness and despair. It's not a film I would ever watch again. But I'm glad I saw it.
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