Something happened on a dark road outside Bucharest, and a boy is dead. We will not learn the details, because that’s not the point of Child’s Pose. The point is watching how character, class, and family dynamics twist the aftermath of a tragic event. There are no scenes of screeching wheels, because this Romanian movie is a series of scenes of people talking in rooms—a tough sell for a publicist, but a compelling experience when the stakes are high and the portrait of human nature is clear-eyed. As it is here.
The dead adolescent, a kid from a peasant family, was running across the road when a car driven by Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache) hit him.