R.M.N. is a 2022 drama film written and directed by Cristian Mungiu. Set in a multiethnic village in Transylvania, Romania, during the 2019–20 holiday season, the film follows a man who returns from Germany and his ex-lover who works in the village. Mungiu named the film after a Romanian acronym for nuclear magnetic resonance, as the film is "an investigation of the brain, a brain scan trying to detect things below the surface".[6] The film is based on the 2020 Ditrău xenophobic incident.[7]
Mungiu wrote the screenplay in the spring of 2021.[6] Filming took place from November 2021 to January 2022 in Rimetea and other villages across Transylvania.[4]
Release
The film premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival in the main competition. In May 2022, IFC Films acquired the North American rights ahead of the premiere,[8] and released it in US theaters on April 28, 2023.[9]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 69 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "R.M.N.'s spare, elegant approach lends a deceptively cool surface to its caustic take on cultural divisions."[11]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 81 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[12]
Accolades
It was awarded the Golden Tower for Best Film at the 2022 European Film Festival Palić[13][14] and received a Special Mention from the Press Jury of the 2022 CinEast Film Festival in Luxembourg.[15]
