Valedictory

GRADUATION (B+) - Cristian Mungiu tells uncomfortable stories that shine a light toward the dark side of human behavior. With his latest, he unfurls a slow, disturbing tale of an everyman navigating the morally ambiguous world of post-communist Romania.

Reaching back to the dull press of daily life in the abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days" (2007), Mungiu presents middle-aged shlub Romeo (Adrian Titieni), who steps up to help his daughter, Eliza (Maria Dragus), who is struggling to complete her week-long college-entrance exams. With Eliza reeling, physically and emotionally, from an attack, Romeo initially seeks out school administrators to accommodate his daughter, who has a cast on her sprained wrist.

Romeo is a doctor, and Eliza needs high scores on the tests in order to fulfill her father's expectations of studying medicine in the United Kingdom and escaping the . Eliza, though, seems burdened by that pressure, and she is giving serious consideration to sticking closer to home -- and closer to her biker boyfriend. The tension between father and daughter is palpable.

Dissatisfied with the response he gets at the school, Romeo, with the help of a morally dubious pal, the local chief inspector (a wonderfully droll Vlad Ivanov), climbs the ladder to find a higher-up who would be able to flag Eliza's exam, give it special attention, and goose her score, if necessary. What could go wrong?

This little scheme of Romeo's is just a symptom of how his life has gone off the rails. He has a distant relationship with his sickly wife, Magda (Lia Bugnar), whose only joys in life seem to involve sleeping or smoking. Romeo has a young girlfriend on the side, Sandra (Malina Manovici), who is a teacher at Eliza's school. The adultery is so casual that it's a bit eerie.

And, actually, Mungiu (bouncing back from his gruesome last feature "Beyond the Hills") has slyly crafted an urban horror film. At every turn, some character or circumstance is giving us the creeps. The film starts with a rock crashing through the window of the home of Romeo, Magda and Eliza, who all treat it as a ho-hum start to another workday. Minor vandalism will plague them throughout the film, with no real resolution. When Eliza views a police lineup, the men are ordered to utter a vulgar line that accompanied the attack, and one of them gets way into the role and has to be restrained. Sandra's son trips the autism scale and likes to parade the grounds of his apartment complex silently in a coyote mask. Toward the end of the film, Romeo tracks a mysterious figure into a rundown residential area at night and gets turned around as if he were being chased through a cornfield by a slasher in a goalie mask.

It's that paranoia that permeates the film and drives it over the course of two gripping hours. Like much of the Romanian New Wave cinema, "Graduation" navigates an ethically complex world in which practical considerations justify low levels of graft and incompetence. Romeo exists in a sort of purgatory. How he makes his way through the moral muck can be fascinating to watch.