Romanian director Mihai Mincan merges the intimate and the political in this tense drama, employing a documentary-like realism to tell the story of a mysterious disappearance during the final years of Romania’s communist regime. The film portrays a childhood fractured by loss and confusion. Set in 1989, just months before Ceaușescu’s fall, it follows the disappearance of the young girl Alina, last seen by her ten-year-old sister, Maria. Rather than focusing on solving the mystery, the screenplay explores the aftermath of Alina’s absence and how Maria navigates the sudden, overwhelming void left in her life.Through Maria’s eyes, Mincan weaves a narrative that straddles the line between reality and imagination, using visual and sound design to create a world caught between memory and hallucination. Maria does not fully comprehend what has happened, yet she experiences the full impact of the tragedy amidst the surrounding uncertainty. In this way, the film treats absence less as a search for external truth and more as a probe into the depths of inner emotion.The disappearance shifts from being a family tragedy to a symbol of an entire generation growing up under a complex political climate. Maria’s confused perspective reflects the contours of that lost childhood. The film’s overall atmosphere—marked by silence, suffocation, and paranoia—mirrors the reality of a nation decaying from within, seamlessly intertwining the personal story with the broader political context.Although rooted in Mincan’s personal experience, the film moves away from conventional naturalism, immersing us in an emotional dimension closer to a dream. Sound and visual effects are used masterfully to express internal states, particularly those of Maria, who seems to feel the world more than she understands it. Emma Ioana Mogos’s performance as Maria is one of the film’s standout elements. Her naturalness gives the character a profound depth, conveying to the viewer the very sense of uncertainty that the film continually seeks to evoke.Hauvick Habéchian