Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World might not be 2024’s best movie, but it is, unquestionably, its most brilliantly entitled. Romanian writer/director Radu Jude is no stranger to elongated monikers, with the likes of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians populating his CV, but it’s difficult to imagine him ever topping this one. Like Rage Against the Machine or Infinite Jest, it marries musicality with meaning while clarifying the project’s overarching aims in the process, for both better and worse. The end is indeed nigh, and there probably won’t be much to write home about. If you ask the taciturn Uber driver at the film’s center, it might already be upon us.

While the endless, traffic-drenched drives through present day Bucharest would be enough to forge an apocalyptic paradigm on their lonesome, they’re far from the only thing powering Angela (Ilinca Manolache) and her relentless pessimism. Gasping her last financial breathes in a global economy that seems determined to choke her out, our anti-heroine moonlights as a talent scout of sorts, seeking out injured workers to star in job safety videos. The testimonials they give, pertaining to lingering pain and personal shame from professional disasters, are commissioned by unseen, overbearing megacorporations, who in turn edit the footage in a manner that absolves them of guilt and protects against litigation. It takes a demon to do the devil’s work, and Angela furthers her damnation by constantly posting to TikTok, hiding her identity behind an Andrew Tate face filter, spewing sexist and xenophobic diatribes to fit her chosen visage.   

With the sheer amount of unsavory attributes Jude had attached to his protagonist, it’s something of a miracle that we don’t turn against her immediately. Much of the credit here goes to Manolache, whose callow nonchalance emits something like a gravitational pull of world-weary cool, subsumming us in her all-encompassing cynicism until its appeal is unavoidable. After all, doom and disaffect are the coin of the realm nowadays, especially amongst a lower class whose ends have been meeting less and less frequently, shadowy conglomerations hellbent on grinding them to dust. You know the world has truly inverted when someone can become a Robin Hood figure by effectively stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, but Angela’s constrictions are knowable, and her nihilism is infectious. In her own regrettable way, she’s sort of a tastemaker.

Or perhaps influencer is more apt, as End of the World is nothing if not of its moment. Affixed with matter-of-fact references to the receding global pandemic as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Jude’s screenplay slices away at our modern catastrophic inflection point with knives so sharp you hardly feel their sting. Less of an attack than a violent capitulation, the movie’s refusal to fight back against corruption and misdeed is as likely to exasperate as it is to please, though the most glass-half-full person in your friend group is going to have a ball. The last few years haven’t been kind to optimists, and even if Jude’s relentless skepticism is something of a dead end, he deserves credit for not shying away from the present tense.

That is until he does just that, splicing in repetitious, punitive retreats to 1981’s Angela merge mai departe, a mostly lost-to-time Romanian film from which Jude culls much of his architecture. Wearing your inspirations on your sleeve isn’t the same as putting on the whole outfit, and while juxtaposing 21st century anxieties against those of the recent past is a good idea on paper, a little would have gone a long way. Instead we get a lot, with large swaths of footage pulling us completely out of the main narrative, causing heads to be scratched and watches to be checked. This affinity for durational dullness finds a second home in endless shots of Angela navigating the city, the thematically pertinent song choices doing little to assuage inevitable boredom. End of the World has plenty of interesting things to show us, but it’s in no hurry to unveil them.

The lack of handholding is admirable, turning bilious social media tirades into a Rorschach test, asking the viewer to decide whether they’re witnessing satire or sanctimony on their own time. It’s just hard to land in the latter camp when the humor isn’t hitting, and Angela’s monologues are too closely hewn to regrettably familiar hate speech to work on a comedic level. They just feel tired, which is surely the point, but in a movie that’s already starving for momentum, one would be forgiven for feeling a little annoyed. Provocateurs risk that response, and Jude is just about the biggest fan of needling you’ll ever cross paths with, his movie’s climactic endurance test bludgeoning all other potential readings to a bloody pulp.

Having finally landed on an ideally damaged voice box, the final shot, which lasts for north of a half hour, sees Angela and crew filming their compromised material with a squalor-stricken family outside in the increasing rain. Dissatisfied with the nuclear unit’s testy self-representation, the producers arrive at a hairbrained solution involving cue cards that intentionally calls back to the iconic music video for Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. The pages are blank of course, to be filled in at a later date by nefarious bad actors behind the safety of computer screens, repurposing Dylan’s confounding jape, once used to keep the system guessing, as subterfuge against the masses. An astute conceit stretched to the point of being nearly unrecognizable, the finale embodies the project writ large, one whose challenging rhetoric is ceaselessly undermined by an impulse to rub the viewer’s nose in monotony and grime. No one knows what those cards will eventually say, but you’d be wise not to expect much.