Amid the turmoil of mass student protests in the streets of Belgrade, two young people are bonded by a rash act of rebellion, despite their outwardly incompatible ideologies. The premise of Serbian writer-director Jelena Maksimović‘s “Until the Day Ends” portends a tidy political parable — a sort of “why can’t we all get along” homily for an age, and particularly a generation, of vastly polarized beliefs. The execution, thankfully, is flintier and more complicated than that. The film’s teachings, if any, are ambiguous, and learned on the run: Maksimović’s first fiction feature is most memorable for its galloping formal restlessness, moving at the breathless pace of its characters as they evade authority and chase a glimmer of hope in their joint resistance.
Having made an impression on the docfest circuit with her two nonfiction features “Taurunum Boy” (2019) and “Homelands (2020), Maksimović brings a street-level, vérité-style grit to the lean narrative of “Until the Day Ends” that feels authentically keyed into the reality of current youth unrest in Eastern Europe. The film is set against a surge of real-life anti-government demonstrations in Serbia in early 2025, triggered by the tragic deaths of 16 people the previous year, following the collapse of a train station canopy in Novi Sad. But if the honest performances of a mostly non-professional ensemble contribute to a docudrama spirit, the filmmaker and her DP Paul Spengemann embrace an aesthetic of epic escapism, with roving, kinetic camerawork punctuated with enough bursting lens flare to make Janusz Kaminski blush.
It’s an attention-grabbing approach that promises bigger things from Maksimović, and is propelling the film some distance on the international festival circuit. A premiere last month in Venice’s Horizons program has since been followed with berths in Vienna, Hamburg and, now, the main competition in Tokyo.
The film opens on a virtuoso long take, roaming through the shadowed, disheveled hallways of a university building that, ahead of the revolution, has become something of a campsite for displaced, rebellious students; insurgent streaks of red disrupt the general gloom of the mise-en-scène. Through this faintly apocalyptic scene, we follow 20-year-old Lena (riveting newcomer Lena Trifunović), a firebrand student activist who is all in on the protests, unwavering in her anti-authoritarian conviction. That may earn her the admiration of her college comrades, but at home, she’s seen as an idealistic naif — mocked, in particular, by her older brother Milan (Miodrag Dragicevic), who is staunchly right-wing in his sympathies.
Milan’s similarly inclined friends join in the teasing, but one does so with a little less gusto: 22-year-old Stefan (Andrija Krivokapić) is a working-class punk who goes with the flow of his social group, but doesn’t seem wholehearted in his pro-government stance. Perhaps sensing his lack of commitment, Lena taunts him back. This hint of connection between them is later made concrete when, at the demonstration, the two are complicit in an act of defiance — throwing a cobblestone at a policeman, badly injuring him — and must skip town for the night.
As they flee, their mutual attraction deepens, but they must also parse their political differences. There’s no great capitulation or come-to-Jesus moment here, however. “Until the Day Ends” isn’t an outright romance, or a tale of a proud, gathering storm of resistance; rather, it finds human emotions and obligations sometimes messily at odds with social and political ideals.
Narratively, the momentum crests at the protest, abetted by Maksimović’s most dynamic cinematic trickery — which extends to a shot from the perspective of the errant, offending stone. As a more intimate two-hander in the second half, the film is less urgent, but kept compelling by the push-pull chemistry between its two punchy young leads, playing characters who are alike in their combative vulnerability, but little more than that. Trifunović, in particular, is a real find, unpredictable in her coiled-up physicality and alternately commanding and petulant presence. Lena bristles with angry, frustrated optimism, recognizable to anyone who has ever, at one point or another, felt alone in trying to change the world.