Aurora

Cristi Puiu's Aurora, a long art film from 2010 that is both agonizing and exhilarating, takes the who out of the whodunit. The director plays the main character, a sociopath who commits multiple murders. The rationale for the crimes is hard to fathom, but not the main character's pathology. Puiu's warts and all commitment to the role is one of the most harrowing and self-abnegating performances I have ever witnessed. A scene where he takes a shower and prods his midsection to adjust a hernia gives a good idea of the lengths Puiu has gone to in laying out this very repellent character for us. 

Some viewers are going to be bored or highly frustrated by this vexing film, but I was intrigued. Puiu gives us mostly mid-shots, often backgrounding the action down a hallway or corridor. The drama of this film, or lack thereof, is continually hidden or partially obscured. The film is a trudge through the labyrinth of a sick mind and, from what we see of Romanian society, a sick culture.

Puiu foregrounds the banality of bourgeois culture, much like another tale of murder: Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Ugly, half finished walls in cramped apartments are the hallmarks of this bitter and uncompromising film, one that is best left to aficionados of European art films and not the general audience.