R.M.N. brings director Cristian Mungius masterful return to form

Some directors can be recognized within the first minute of their film: Such is the case with Cristian Mungiu, whose rigor, intense focus and painterly sense of composition can be immediately discerned in the opening shot of “R.M.N.” A quiet, still image of an empty Romanian village washed in wintry hues of blue and gray, the scene is classic Mungiu, exemplifying his gifts for plunging viewers into an environment, then suffusing that environment with understated but undeniable tension.

The village in question is a tightknit community in Transylvania, best known as the home of Dracula. But most of the monsters in “R.M.N.” are unseen, and the most vampiric force abroad in the land is that of global capitalism at its most pitilessly rational. As the movie opens, a butcher named Matthias (Marin Grigore) is working at a German slaughterhouse, where he head-butts a manager after being called a “lazy Gypsy.” Matthias heads back to his hometown in Romania, where environmental concerns have closed the local mine, forcing most of his peers to seek employment elsewhere. He’s greeted with chilly indifference by his wife, Ana (Macrina Barladeanu), who has been concerned about the couple’s 8-year-old son, Rudi (Mark Edward Blenyesi), who saw something in the woods that frightened him so much he stopped speaking. Meanwhile, Matthias’s former lover Csilla (Judith State), who manages a bakery, is trying to find enough workers to qualify for a badly needed grant from the European Union.

No villagers have answered Csilla’s ads, so she hires two laborers from Sri Lanka, a move that will eventually send the village into a tailspin of xenophobia, ethnic chauvinism and selective historical amnesia: The title of “R.M.N.” refers to “nuclear magnetic resonance,” or what Americans would call an MRI; in the film, Matthias’s father undergoes the procedure to diagnose a brain disorder, but Mungiu clearly intends for the surrounding story to be a microscopic investigation of the pathologies infecting his countrymen — not to mention the rest of the world. In a series of carefully observed and often beautifully staged and choreographed encounters, Mungiu delves into the daily rituals that define his characters both as individuals and as a collective. We see Csilla, at night, shedding her practical persona to drink wine in her attractively appointed cottage while practicing the cello. And Mungiu draws particularly rich portraits of communal life in the village, whether it’s at a lively Christmas pageant featuring adorably costumed children or an atavistic parade of grown-ups dressed as the bears that lurk at the outer edges of their town.

As in Jafar Panahi’s “No Bears” earlier this year, ursine metaphors are rife in “R.M.N.,” which features a subplot involving a French researcher who has come to Transylvania to do a wildlife census. He stands in for the E.U.’s earnest brand of liberalism that comes in for a drubbing in “R.M.N.’s” most powerful scene, a raucous town hall that Mungiu films in a bravura continuous shot reminiscent of a similarly riveting dinner-table confrontation in his 2007 masterpiece “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.”

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That film was a raw, naturalistic portrait of a young woman trying to terminate a pregnancy in post-Soviet Romania; here, the political context is far different and, arguably, much more complex as the ethnic Hungarians, Romanians and Roma citizens of “R.M.N.’s” small village argue about who rightfully belongs there and why. Male anxiety and aggression form a jittery ostinato to the proceedings, as Matthias tries to train Rudi in masculinist skills like fishing, fending and fighting. The trick, he tells his son, is to stop feeling pity. “Those who feel pity die first,” he says. “I want you to die last.”

So much fear and misplaced anger are at play in Matthias’s increasingly hysterical behavior that “R.M.N.” might as well be an X-ray of contemporary America. But his brutishness and attraction to violence also raise the question of why someone as sensitive as Csilla would be attracted to him. What’s more, Mungiu’s delicately disciplined realism fails him in “R.M.N.’s” final moments, when the story collapses into a muddle of a sudden and unexplained apology and a clumsy exercise in literalism.

Up to that point, however, “R.M.N.” is as gripping and scrupulously humane as Mungiu’s admirers have come to expect from an artist of supreme discipline and dramatic skill. It’s one thing to be a master of mise-en-scene; it’s all the more impressive when that talent for detail — pictorial and behavioral — results in an illumination of the world that’s both ruthless and surpassingly compassionate.

Unrated. At the AFI Silver. Contains profanity, nudity, smoking, disturbing images and adult themes. In English, Romanian, Hungarian, German, French and Sinhala with subtitles. 125 minutes.

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