You Don’t Belong Here: Golden Leopard winner settles into hopelessness as if it was a woolly blanket

• Reviewed from the 2026 Locarno Film Festival

A group of cyclists appear in an empty underpass in the middle of a cold night in the city of Reșița, Romania. They’re hooded and tooled up as they ride into an ordinary looking street and slash the tires of parked cars, smash windscreens and paste them with stickers as the car alarms begin to blare. A Roma man runs out of a house to challenge the vandals and is beaten to the ground. In another neighborhood, a doctor comes home from a run in the early morning to find his car also vandalised. The sticker is now clearly legible with the title of the film: “You Don’t Belong Here.”     

Written, directed and produced by Florin Șerban, the film explores xenophobia on its most visible level but deep down seems to be addressing a more existential question: do any of us really belong here?  

After the victim of the hate crime attack has died from his wounds, he is brought to the hospital of Dr. Marius Călimanescu (Adrian Văncică). He is a respected member of the community; he’s friends with the police chief Silviu (Alex Conovaru) and is a widower and a single parent to his teenaged son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu). He’s shown to be a brilliant surgeon who has sacrificed a potentially more lucrative career because he wanted to serve his hometown.  

Family members from the Roma community are furious with the idea of an autopsy being performed and riot in the waiting room, demanding to be given the body. Meanwhile, Dr Călimanescu’s son Ioan has hurt his leg and is worried it might be broken but won’t give his name when he visits the doctor, who immediately recognises that the injury wasn’t caused by a bike fall.  

At first, Dr. Călimanescu appears to be a self-satisfied and relatively happy man. He is loved and respected by colleague Dana (Cristina Richter), with whom he has casual sexual hook ups. But his son’s lack of ambition is a cause of concern – he can’t help but feel he’s turning out to be a failure. He expresses similar disdain for his colleagues and complains that all the idiots in his school became teachers. The doctor mistakes his own good fortune for justice and considers everyone else’s misfortune as the result of their ineptness. But he is in for a rude awakening. In fact, Dr. Călimanescu’s trajectory is similar to that of Job from the Old Testament. 

When fate catches up with him, it arrives with a crash. First, there’s the corpse of the murdered man. Now the police want to question his son about the homicide. Dr. Călimanescu confesses to Dana that other people think he is mean, and he worries they are right. It’s clear the idea of ‘demanding of higher standards’ was just coverage for his own arrogance. 

As in the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, scenes stretch out – long conversations are allowed their beginning, middle and end – but the narrative moves relentlessly forward, propelled by the chugging engine of inevitability. Liviu Mãrghidan’s camera takes in the chilly urban landscapes as well as carving the domestic and institutional spaces as coolly as Călimanescu’s scalpel. There’s something of Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (2016) and R.M.N. (2022) here, as well as Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (2014) and About Dry Grasses (2023). This is a world in which the protagonists are middle-aged men who have kept themselves away from the fray only to find that the gravity of their country is pulling them down into a world of compromise and corruption. They become frazzled and are often physically attacked, before coming to a tragic realisation, or simply facing despair.  

This isn’t necessarily a criticism of the film. More accurately, this criticism is included in the film. During a school reunion scene, Dr. Călimanescu’s former classmates rise and humble brag about their lives since leaving school. Here are other stories that could be told; other perspectives we could have seen. Static cameras, carefully framed shots, muddy pacing, and more questions than answers settle into hopelessness as if it was a woolly blanket. In fact, the mise-en-scene is so enervated that the hospital where Dr. Călimanescu works seems to be an almost silent place with barely any patients, as if everyone’s been anaesthetised. This is a solid piece work and an uncontroversial winner of the Golden Leopard, yet there is something overly-familiar about both the subject and its treatment.