The highly prolific Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude has, in the past year alone, directed two fictional features, co-directed a feature-length documentary, and released a one-hour experimental film made entirely of webcam footage shot at Andy Warhol’s grave.

Unlike his more famous fellow countryman, the Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu, whose intricately crafted dramas come out every four or five years, Jude likes to make movies quick and dirty, as if his productions had a hard time keeping up with all the ideas racing through his head. His last two features — Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn — were both ripped-from-the-headlines satires that felt fast, fresh and utterly contemporary, like they were shot on the fly.

The same could be said for his latest morality tale, Kontinental ’25, which has more of a universal bent to it yet makes references to such hot-button topics as the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as Hungary’s despotic leader Viktor Orbán. Consisting of lengthy one-take dialogues revolving around guilt, politics, racism, religion and social justice, it’s not an easy sit if you’re looking for an edge-of-your-seat narrative. Jude has a lot to say here — the movie could have been made as a stage play, so much does it rely on long conversations — but as usual the director finds an intriguing way to say those things.

The plot is simple and isn’t even much of a plot: When a bailiff, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), tries to evict a homeless man, Ion (Gabriel Spahiu, who starred in Romanian New Wave classic The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), from the basement in a building that’s about to be knocked down, the latter winds up committing suicide. Shocked by the incident, Orsolya spends the aftermath dealing with her guilt.

That’s all that really happens in terms of the story. As for the content, the rest of the movie features Orsolya drifting from one encounter to another, meeting with friends and family to talk about what happened and try to unpack her feelings. There’s a didactic, Brechtian structure to the movie — Brecht is cited several times in the dialogue — in which Jude asks the viewer to question what the death of Ion means in a society wracked by rampant capitalism, racist nationalism and religious extremism.

Orsolya herself is a victim of such trends. We learn that the building where she was evicting Ion was bought out by a German investment fund, which plans to convert it to a boutique hotel. Meanwhile, a conversation between Orsolya and her caustic mom (Annamária Biluska) reveals their origins as Hungarians who emigrated to Transylvania, a Romanian region filled with both pro and anti-Hungarian sentiment (also the subject of Mungiu’s excellent 2022 drama, R.M.N.). When Orsolya engages in a drunken overnight chat with a former law student (Adonis Tanta) now working as an Uber Eats deliverer, the latter claims he’s a Zen Buddhist, but has “I Am Romanian” written in flashing LED lights on his delivery bag so that racist drivers don’t mistake him for an immigrant and run him over.

Jude revels in such contradictions and makes them the very substance of Kontinental ’25, which is named after the street where Ion killed himself. “Legally I’m not at fault,” Orsolya says early on, “but I’m not feeling alright.” The movie consists of her trying to feel better by talking things out, whether it’s with her husband before he leaves with the kids on a trip to Greece; an old friend (Oana Mardare) who tells a parable-like story about a homeless man setting up camp in front of her apartment; or an Orthodox priest (Serban Pavlu) who doesn’t make things much better by reveling in God’s mysteries.

The director gives us an earful, and the fact that regular DP Marius Panduru shoots each sequence from a fixed camera position, without any cutting or varying angles, can make some of the discussions tedious. A few inserts shake things up, including one shocking video that shows a Russian soldier blowing his head off with a grenade. Jude uses that and other topical references to set the action in the tumultuous present, although the guilt Orsolya faces could happen at any moment in history.

While Kontiental ’25 is a loquacious affair, it’s bookended by two documentary-style sequences in which there’s no talking at all. In the opening one, we see Ion wandering around Cluj to collect bottles and cans, which he cashes in to buy vodka. He’s no model citizen, though we learn he was once a star athlete before an injury drove him to alcoholism and then homelessness. In the closing montage, a series of shots reveal construction sites around the city, soberly implying that there’s plenty of housing available, just not for everyone. If Orsolya will soon get back to her life and job, Ion will not, and Jude hammers home that reality by showing how their fates are driven by factors well beyond their control.