A child sees something impressive in the forest and can no longer speak. It's Rudi, Matthias' son, who is about to escape from Germany where he works in a slaughterhouse. He returns to his village in Transylvania, where his wife and sick father live.

The industrial bakery directed by Csilla, his former lover, is having trouble finding staff because the offered salary does not suit the locals, who are opposed to hiring people from abroad.

The village is multicultural because Transylvania is a territory long contested between two countries, Romania and Hungary, but there are also many Germans living here, to whom the territories along the Carpathian Mountains were assigned 700 years ago. A land of populist and nationalist movements, the film also speaks of the presence of Russians and Ukrainians, whites and blacks, Sunnis and Shiites, rich and poor.

Everyone speaks their own language, but also the English of globalization, and the more sophisticated ones speak French, while there are those who only speak their incomprehensible native language.

Everyone has their own religion: Romanians are mostly Orthodox but also Greek-Catholics, Germans are Lutherans but also Calvinists, Hungarians are Catholics but also Unitarians. There are therefore many churches, and the bells have a different sound, and although the Protestant ones are now closed, you can visit them or have the bells ring for a deceased person abroad.

Furthermore, during the film, the Miorita, a Romanian national ballad that tells the story of three shepherds and their flock, is often played. Each of them comes from different regions, and whoever has more sheep is the richest, so the others decide to kill him and take over his flock. Despite nature, the dog, and his animals warning him of the danger, the shepherd believes in fate and waits for it to be fulfilled.

The representation of this pattern called ascending and descending is studied by children and portrayed in the Christmas play because it is a metaphor for telling true stories and traditions hidden behind this narrative.

If Romania is all this and much more, globalization is the new Tower of Babel.

If no one buys and consumes the bread produced by the local industrial bakery because it is kneaded by non-EU workers from Sri Lanka, despite accepting salaries rejected by the locals, it seems useless to discuss together to find a point of agreement because "everyone has their place in the world": "we got rid of the gypsies and now the Nepalese are coming."

"To survive, all you need is to have no pity," Matthias' crude chauvinism does not accept how his wife educates their son, and while his father Otto, who suffers from narcolepsy, which prevents him from working as a shepherd, is undergoing an examination to understand the cause.

The "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" from which the original title R.M.N. comes is the diagnostic investigation to be administered not only to the father but to the entire community of the Transylvanian mountains and the whole of Europe.

Mungiu reflects on Romania's role within the European Union, as he did in his film "Beyond the Hills," questioning the dilemmas of today's society, such as the atavistic need to belong and identify with one's own ethnic group, religion, gender, social class.

It talks about prejudice and discrimination, stereotypes and destiny, globalization and disorientation in the cognitive and moral chaos of our days.

If R.M.N., the original title to be kept, is a tool for investigating the brain (in this case), a scan that allows visualizing the various encephalic components through detailed three-dimensional images to search for what lies beneath the surface, it is because "empathy and other social interaction skills originate in this area of the cortex," in the frontoparietal area of the brain, while "the more animal instincts" (hence perhaps "Wild Animals" in the Italian title) "that contribute to the survival of the human species occupy the remaining 99% of the brain" (with all the reservations and scientific insights that this type of information requires).

Therefore, Mungiu, in choosing this title, would not hesitate to denounce an organic factor that inevitably conditions the fate of the human collective.

The film, which may seem rhetorical, banal, and perspicuous, reveals itself, however, after careful analysis, essential, original, enigmatic, and defiant.

Metaphor is the guiding thread, allusion the indelible trace: nothing is what it seems, like Rudi's aphasia and the wild animals.

The allegory of the West arriving in Romania, between bears and xenophobia, to describe the concept of identity of a drifting Europe.

However:

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice