11/08/2026 - Romanian director Florin Serban explores social and family conflicts sparked by a weakening patriarchal model that feeds off its own anger

Florin Serban returns to directing to probe contemporary Romanian society through the fraught relationship between a father and his son. You Don’t Belong Here, screening in the International Competition of the Locarno Film Festival, is a powerful, precise film unafraid to expose the grotesque side of a masculinity in crisis, clumsily clinging to patriarchal values that only generate suffering. Its protagonists are Marius Călimănescu, a respected, self-assured surgeon (played by Adrian Văncică), and his son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu), an introverted, enigmatic teenager who lost his mother when he was little.

Marius and Ioan could not be more different. The former is a traditionalist who accepts no weakness (neither his own nor that of others), and believes success and moral rectitude are the only ambitions worth having. The latter is awkward, confused and insecure, unable to be the virile man his father demands. This stark contrast leads the father to silently despise his son, causing him profound suffering. Like a bomb ready to go off, Ioan’s resentment builds inside him, turning into a blind rage with no clear target. Incapable of thinking for himself, he lets himself be recruited by a group of far-right thugs who spur him to commit the irreparable.

Shot almost entirely in long takes, the movie views the world through Marius’s eyes - it's a world with no room for excuses, built on moral rectitude, strength of character and heroic deeds. Like any self-respecting man, Marius has done everything society expected of him: he studied and became a respectable surgeon and family man. The idea that his son might not want to, or might be unable to, follow in his footsteps is inconceivable to him, as if the weakness he sees in the boy could taint the aura of respectability he enjoys. The undisputed king of a world he interprets solely through a stern patriarchal lens, Marius dominates every frame. As in real life, the characters around him exist only through him, within the confines of the shots that frame him.

Immensely proud of himself to the point of arrogance (the scene in which he tells his lover outright that he despises his son is shocking), the feature's protagonist, as well as his police-officer friend, dreams of a world where everyone knows their place, where the strong prevail and the weak are crushed. His rock-solid self-assurance is so pure that its gradual crumbling, up to the final defeat, becomes all the more evident and, in some respects, exhilarating. In the end, the film has neither winners nor losers, only a collection of wounded, lost human beings who no longer know what to cling to in order to keep on believing in their ideals. Formally precise and powerful, You Don’t Belong Here reveals, in an almost grotesque way, the paradoxes of an obsolete yet still dangerously present patriarchal model. Cruelly poetic, the film slips into the cracks of this model, making it wobble until it eventually collapses.

You Don’t Belong Here was produced by Romania’s Fantascope Films. Reason8 handles its international sales.

(Translated from Italian)