Karlovy Vary 2024: Three Kilometres to the End of the World (by Emanuel Pârvu) | Review
Three Kilometres to the End of the World isn’t a marathon film that speaks about running in a race. It’s a slow-burning drama that depicts a happy Romanian family that gets shattered into pieces by a hate crime that befalls the son. A disclosure arises, and everyone starts corroding on the inside.
The Cannes 2024 Queer Palm Award-winning film, Three Kilometres to the End of the World (Trei kilometri până la capătul lumii) has a puzzling nature intertwined with silence. The sounds of rustling trees, whooshing breezes, and the almost speechless moments among the community seem tranquil. Don’t let these tranquil sounds of nature mislead you; the loud exclamation of sham is quite gruesome.
Father and mother live with their son Adi in a rural Romanian village at the Danube Delta, all safe and sound, with nothing much to boast about. The father harbors financial constraints and must gradually clear a debt, yet it doesn’t seem to impact the family’s happiness and peace. Adi, in his own secretive personal life, spends time with a tourist within the vicinity of the village with much excitement and a sense of exploration. The next day, bruises cover his face and body, and everything around him changes drastically.
Romanian director Emanuel Pârvu uses the Cristian Mungiu thematic formula (another legendary Romanian director) by eliminating sensationalism from his co-screenplay with Miruna Berescu to express his view on the dark spots of certain Romanian communities. There are also traces of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s style of invoking tension, presented in a non-directive order, flamboyantly covering the opportunistic element each individual harbors toward one another for different reasons. The art of keeping oneself first on the safer radar illuminates the basis of survivalism, where power, bigotry, social hierarchy, and inflation play major roles. The intertwined connections and the potential to alter their nature transform into a trade agreement, putting a life at immediate risk.
Ironically, Pârvu doesn’t focus on the search for suspects in the crime but instead guides us through a journey involving intimidation, hatred, social politics, and perceptions. The film zooms into a pigeon-eyed view (thanks to cinematographer Silviu Stavilă, the effects of these occurrences are portrayed adeptly) of social oppression against homosexuality, diving into social pressure and corruption from both the minds of the community and the legal process of finding the truth. The aspect of “living for society,” where acceptance is the bare minimum of a community’s options for action, becomes obscured. What’s worse is when religious interventions solidify the social abuse structure, mercilessly attempting to place their reasoning as the ultimate solution to a comprehensible situation. We find ourselves in a state of uncertainty, questioning whether Adi’s initial beating or the mental torment he’s endured caused more harm.
Trust issues are broken, relationships are shaken, words get twisted, peace goes sideways, and privacy is overruled. Perhaps it’s a sociopolitical agenda that clings to the examination of morality with the intention of preserving reputation and prestige while disregarding the rest.
Three Kilometres to the End of the World, showcased in the Horizons section of the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, reveals a shocking secret of falsely turning a black sheep into a white sheep by a few strokes of lies and blood, where hatred could arise from the people you would least expect. Traps are set everywhere; be sure to know where to step while you’re still sprinting.
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