‘You Don’t Belong Here’ review: Locarno Golden Leopard winner is tense, slow-burn study of Romanian masculinity

Dir: Florin Serban. Romania. 2026. 154mins

Romanian filmmaker Florin Serban offers a coolly clinical observation of the disintegration of one man’s carefully constructed world in this slow-burn drama. His examination of toxic masculinity through the relationship of a father and son views it as a gradually accruing poison, rather than something that arrives a single dose. The director’s approach, which shows a gradual and tragic unravelling across a couple of days, deliberately tests the stamina of the audience, challenging them to sit with the characters and examine the contours of their lives and attitudes. It’s a strategy that succeeds to a point but the static nature of certain scenes is likely to prove too much for some.

Serban’s careful dissection recalls the work of his fellow countrymen like Cristi Puiu

The winner of Locarno’s Golden Leopard for best film in the international competition, Serban’s careful dissection recalls the work of his fellow countrymen like Cristi Puiu. Serban’s 2010 debut If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle won Berlin’s Silver Bear before a healthy festival run and, similarly, this film’s Locarno accolade is sure to help it travel – it will next play Sarajevo. Arthouse distributors with an interest in Romanian New Wave cinema could also be tempted.

The film is set in Resita, in the west of Romania, and we are introduced to the place before we meet its characters, brutalist architecture blending with something more modern. It looks uneventful until a gang of youths on bikes intrude, with vandalism and violence in mind. Zeroing in on a Roma area, they slash car tyres and leave “You don’t belong here” stickers on the windscreens. When a man attempts to stop them, he becomes the next target and they leave him dead in the street.

One of those adolescents involved was Ioan (Teodor Butanescu), who tells the sceptical school nurse that his limp and bruises are the result of falling off his bike. Ioan’s father Marius (Adrian Vancica) – who has been raising his son alone since the death of his wife – is a self-assured and self-satisfied surgeon at the local hospital where the dead man’s body is awaiting autopsy and which has just been trashed by the victim’s Roma family. Serban is not interested in crafting a whodunnit, instead opting for a bleak character study that puts Marius’ and Ioan’s motivations under the microscope, while asking questions of wider social attitudes.

Masculinity is a mainstay of Marius’ life. An early conversation with chief of police Silviu (Alex Conovaru), who he has known since childhood, sees them note that while other countries may have stopped making “real men” like Welsh miner-turned-singing heartthrob Tom Jones, Romania has not. Even their black coffee is allowed no embellishment. A tense scene at home indicates Marius does not think his introspective son is making the grade in that department, while Ioan’s small rebellions as he eats telegraph his resentment. That Marius tells his son to use a fork while simultaneously eating his own food with his hands is a perfect illustration of his myopia when it comes to self-scrutiny.

As police suspicion begins to fall on Ioan, the question becomes not so much what Marius might do, but what his motivations might be. “What if I’m not as great as I think I am and I’m just mean,” he asks his lover (Cristina Richter) - although she is little more than another incidental object in a mental landscape that essentially starts and stops with the surgeon’s consideration of his own status.

Shot in long, largely static takes by Liviu Marghidan, Serban frequently traps his characters in confined patches of light down corridors or cramped together. Elsewhere, he wrings tension from dead space such as stairwells that go empty for minutes. The quality of the acting is also essential to You Don’t Belong Here’s success and Vancica masterfully takes us on the mental slide with Marius as the carefully constructed scaffolding of his life begins to crumble away, and he realises he can’t even articulate his emotional needs. The film’s final minutes, in which the action jumps forward, feel like a strange left turn towards unnecessary theatricality given the pressure cooker environment that have preceded them.