Aurora

When the central character in ?Aurora? begins eyeballing another person ? turning his shiver-inducing gaze on a complaining co-worker, on a salesgirl who anxiously laughs out of turn and even on a child who innocently returns his look ? he seems like a man possessed. His eyes lock and the whites catch the light, shining without revelation. You may think you?re in Charles Manson-ville. (It?s only Romania.) For the most part, Viorel, the character played by the film?s director, Cristi Puiu, doesn?t explain or, for that matter, bother to do much talking. Mr. Puiu also directed the 2005 festival favorite ?The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,? by turns a deadly serious comedy and comically deadpan drama about a broken-down man in a broken-down society dying alone among a veritable crowd of people. That film felt like a relative talk-a-thon compared with ?Aurora,? a quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.