Cristian Mungiu’s monastery drama is patient, painful and worth the time, with two performances that keep its questions about faith personal. The middle section repeats itself, but the women remain difficult to forget.
Beyond the Hills is a demanding, deeply affecting drama that takes too long to get where it is going. Cristian Mungiu places two women’s attachment within a Romanian monastery and asks what happens when the people around them think they know how love should be expressed. Nobody needs to think of themselves as cruel for another person to suffer. The film gives those people time to explain themselves, and makes us attend to Alina even when her demands are difficult to like.
Cristina Flutur makes Alina’s need for affection difficult to dismiss, even when her demands become hard to bear. We found her longing painful to watch, because her insistence on being loved leaves so little room for Voichita’s own wishes. Cosmina Stratan gives Voichita enough feeling to prevent the relationship becoming a demonstration of opposing beliefs. Their performances keep bringing us back to two particular women whenever the discussion of faith threatens to turn them into examples.
Valeriu Andriuță’s Priest and Dana Tapalagă’s Mother superior give the monastery people whose convictions we have to consider. Neither performance encourages us to settle comfortably into contempt. Cristian Mungiu’s screenplay allows the community to take its own beliefs seriously, so that a decision can be comprehensible and still cause alarm. He is especially good at showing how certainty can survive contact with another person’s distress, when we might expect that distress to prompt a question.
Oleg Mutu’s cinematography supplies the time this requires. The long takes let discomfort gather around the women, and we are left to decide which claims on their loyalty deserve our sympathy. Production designers Călin Papură and Mihaela Poenaru make the monastery convincing as a place people might choose to belong to, which is essential to the film’s fairness. The setting needs to make sense as a home for its inhabitants before we can understand why they would accept its authority.
Mircea Olteanu’s editing is patient with the performances, but the same patience becomes a problem in the middle section. At 150 minutes, the film returns to disagreements whose terms we have already grasped, and several exchanges add duration without deepening our understanding. We began to anticipate another round of the same dispute, which dulled the anxiety the earlier scenes had built. A tighter cut could have kept the difficulty of the choices without making us feel that the discussion had begun again.
Religious dramas can make disbelief a comfortable position for the audience, and this one denies us that comfort. Cristian Mungiu lets the women’s relationship remain awkward enough to resist being made into a simple case against the monastery. There is much here to be angry about, but the film makes us examine whom we are angry with and why. Save it for an evening when a difficult film will be welcome, and allow more patience than some of those middle scenes deserve.
