An almost-realtime study of the last hours of a Romanian widower's life, from the first phonecall the hospital to his final moments lying naked in an overstretched ward, this film, while dark and downbeat, never wallows in the gloom but instead shows a well defined array of characters responding to the central character's situation in a fully believable way.

The film opens with Mr Lazarescu ("Lazarescu Dante Remus") feeding his cats, and then two phone calls. The first, to his sister, gently descends into an argument over money, which he insists he has sent. The second, a short while later, is a call the request paramedics as he has a severe headache. He sits and vomits into his hand ("Compote", he says, in a matter-of-fact way). He then pays a visit to his neighbours in the flat opposite to ask for painkillers, and they help him back to his untidy flat where the neighbour (a kind of Romanian Gerard Depardieu) has to phone the hospital again to hurry them up.

The ambulance eventually arrives and the general consensus is that he just has a bad hangover, until the paramedic hears he had vomited blood and begin to suspect something more serious. From this point on Mr Lazarescu himself almost becomes secondary to the other characters as his life slowly fades away while he is driven, pushed and scanned from hospital to hospital. Tired and jaded doctors try to juggle waiting lines of patients, the ranks of injured swelled by a bus accident. The system is clearly stretched, and is more than a little reminiscent of our own NHS.

The raw style could almost be mistaken for a documentary at times, with long takes and ill-lit scenes. This certainly helps give the move an edge that makes it both compelling and bleak.

Note that the director has planned a further 5 films, under the collective title "Stories from the suburbs of Bucharest".

Seen at London Film Festival October 2005