Where Poetic Horror Meets Absurd Comedy: Don’t Let Me Die
Andrei Epure’s short film Intercom 15 (2021), which premiered in Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique, revolves around a symbolic junction: the slightly dilapidated entrance to an apartment building. The visual pleasure extracted from Epure’s roughly 20-minute staging is almost mechanical. A woman lies unconscious by the entrance, and in the first few minutes, the door keeps swinging open, ejecting new characters into the scene – characters who, judging by the dialogue, know the woman more by sight than personally. She turns out to be one of their neighbours. Just as imperturbably mechanical, after observing her mostly from a distance, each person who comes out – like dancers in a ballet of passing urban interactions – finds an excuse and leaves. Until the ambulance arrives, the only one who stays with the woman is a student, apparently the same person the woman had buzzed on the intercom a few hours earlier. A panoramic camera movement follows the student as she eventually leaves, only to return to the spot where the woman had lain, now officially declared dead – a visual arc of subtle, spectral guilt.
Don’t Let Me Die, Epure’s feature debut, currently in competition at the Locarno Film Festival in the Cineasti del Presente section, is both an expansion and an amplification of Intercom 15. The feature doesn’t open with the dilapidated apartment-block entrance, but before long, anyone who has seen Intercom 15 will recognise the exact same location. In fact, Epure carries over quite a lot from the 2021 film – most notably, Cosmina Stratan in the lead role, part of the old cast, as well as certain character names or lines slightly altered from the short. But there are variations between the two films; the most important detail that changed is the apartment number of the soon-to-be-dead woman. There’s also a key addition: one of the film’s first scenes reconstructs the middle-of-the-night intercom call, a near-inhuman, lugubrious cry that sets the film’s tone from the outset.
To be fair, Intercom 15 would have been difficult to mistake for a realist exercise. Even if the short’s first half was, in spirit or at least in premise, a New Romanian Wave-style variation à la Cristi Puiu – a parade of characters, each with their own personality and wisdom, are roaming around a destitute person – its second half deliberately unsettled this surface of possible mock-documentary through atmosphere and conspicuous camera moves. In Don’t Let Me Die, Epure seems determined to push even further away from this apartment-block realism. At least two major questions were left open in Intercom 15: who is the woman lying on the ground outside the building, and how did she end up dying almost in front of her neighbours’ eyes? Co-writing the screenplay with Ana Maria Gheorghe, Epure’s approach here follows the typical modernist arthouse principle: the more information we gather about the deceased woman, the murkier and more uncertain things become. Moreover, once some general facts are established, the film begins to toy suggestively with genre structure: late-night intercom calls take on a threatening tone, and the things the protagonist sees shift into a space between the strange, the hallucinatory, and the supernatural.
All this might have worked as an exercise in controlled ambiguity with a horror edge, had the director not decided to construct the film in two emotional registers. Don’t Let Me Die never fully settles on whether it wants to be an artsy horror or an absurd comedy about death. The split is almost symmetrical: day versus night. At night, death seeps in like a ghostly threat, the residue of guilt; by day, the tragedy of a stranger’s death turns, through dialogue, into a black comedy about the bureaucratic labyrinth of a funeral. On paper, this doesn’t sound bad. But in practice, the alternation between scenes creates a kind of calculated, slightly affected incoherence.
Don’t Let Me Die never fully settles on whether it wants to be an artsy horror or an absurd comedy about death.
The film contains slow, contemplative passages in which the protagonist barely crosses paths with a neighbour in the empty hallways of her building. Interspersed among these mood-setting moments are occasional group portraits of neighbours, which only show how absurd these encounters between people with wildly different, stubbornly held opinions of various comedic hues can be. And every now and then, you have one-on-one dialogues that either add a sliver of information or act as outlets for something broader – a state of perpetual absurdity the film tries to pin down in words. In one such exchange, preserved from Intercom 15, a walk-on character suddenly confides to the protagonist, theatrically: “I’m going through a tragedy.” What follows sounds like a conspiracy theory refracted through a personal lens (“I realised when my father died suddenly that it was a setup. I mean, they kill you as a pack.”). The protagonist tries to slip in a piece of advice, but is promptly rebuffed: she doesn’t want to listen, doesn’t know how to listen. Full stop, next scene. Somehow, from these loosely connected, stand-alone scenes – like exhibits in a museum of day-to-day alienation – and from occasional images with a tinge of poetic oddness (apples scattered on concrete stairs, two characters frozen face-to-face), Epure attempts to build a meaningful backdrop for the half-sinister, half-farce story he lays out methodically. As a viewer, I found this slippery, slightly confusing framework a pointer toward something larger, without being able to finally gauge what that half-conveyed “something” was meant to be.
It’s a pity, because Epure – especially in his recent work as a screenwriter – has proven himself to be a fresh voice worth taking seriously. In Man and Dog (2021), directed by Ștefan Constantinescu, Epure’s dialogue was generally meticulous, attentive to detail and the rhythm of everyday speech. His most important and longstanding creative partnership remains with Sebastian Mihăilescu. The recent Mammalia (2023), written by Epure and Mihăilescu and directed by the latter, shares the unsettling atmosphere and occasional flickers of emotion found in Don’t Let Me Die. Both filmmakers try to shoot something that appears realistic on the surface but is deeply anxiety-ridden beneath – with the key difference that Mihăilescu’s locations often have a monumental, urban-surreal air.
Seen side by side, the films Epure has worked on communicate through poetic motifs (a dream about turning into a tree recounted by a character in Mammalia finds its own visual illustration toward the end of Don’t Let Me Die) and a general air of macabre sarcasm. In one Mammalia scene, the bones of a human skeleton are dropped carelessly – and morbidly comically – on a staircase: a neat summary of the irreverent humour sprinkled throughout Epure’s recent scripts. More broadly, both Mammalia and Don’t Let Me Die are recent examples of Romanian cinema showing, in oblique ways, the influence of a new, artsy, existential, and ambiguous kind of horror – the sort practised, for instance, by directors associated with A24. In Mammalia, certain scenes drift close to parodying films like the now-iconic Midsommar. In Don’t Let Me Die, the patina of artsy horror is fainter, more diffuse, but still present. There’s something fresh in these homegrown responses to a recognisable formula, especially in the way the nocturnal urban setting is shot to appear threatening, symbolic, and somewhat timeless. What’s still missing, especially in Don’t Let Me Die, is a fully embraced coherence.
Radu Toderici is a film critic and researcher. Lately he’s interested in the history of the Romanian cinema during socialism. He writes for Steaua literary magazine and is also a professor at the University of Theatre & Film Babes-Bolyai, from Cluj. He believes the recipe for a good life includes at least one and a half film a day.
Title
Nu mă lăsa să mor
Director/ Screenwriter
Andrei Epure
Actors
Cosmina Stratan
Country
România, Bulgaria, Franța
Year
2025
Distributor
Independența Film
Radu Toderici is a film critic and researcher. Lately he’s interested in the history of the Romanian cinema during socialism. He writes for Steaua literary magazine and is also a professor at the University of Theatre & Film Babes-Bolyai, from Cluj. He believes the recipe for a good life includes at least one and a half film a day.