4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (15)

A glimmer of light in a world of dark despair: It might not send you out dancing, but this bleak Romanian drama will draw you in with its compelling acting

Of all the words you might read in a film review, which are the likeliest to deter you from rushing to your nearest art-house cinema? "Uncompromising", probably. "Abortion", for sure. How about "Romanian"? They say that "masterpiece" is sometimes considered a turn-off, and that the phrase "Cannes Palme d'Or winner" can sound alarm bells. So if I tell you that Cristian Mungiu's uncompromising, Cannes Palme d'Or-winning Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a masterpiece, you'll just have to trust me and see it, no questions asked.

This intense realist exercise is set in 1987, toward the end of the Ceausescu regime. Two young women, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), share a room in a student dorm. We first see Gabita packing a bag for some unknown purpose, and Otilia buying black market cigarettes from their neighbours. Otilia later attempts to book a hotel room, only to meet the first in a chain of surly and obstructive desk clerks. The film quickly sketches a picture of a communist state in which every sour official's aim is to make everyone feel guilty and grateful for what little help they can get: a jobsworth culture par excellence.

It's only some 40 minutes in that it becomes entirely clear what's at stake. In their hotel room, the two women rendezvous with a soft-spoken, drab, bland-faced man called Mr Bebe (the quietly unnerving Vlad Ivanov), his name either a cruel chance or an even crueller pseudonym, for he is an illegal abortionist. He's there to attend to the naive Gabita, whose pregnancy turns out to be further advanced than she claimed. Bebe starts – wearily, calmly, menacingly – to argue about the money, the difficulty of the job, the punishment he faces if caught, and finally agrees to operate, but at a price the women hadn't foreseen.

This long, quietly agonising negotiation scene is a marvel of claustrophobic concision, the volume hardly rising in a setting of utter mundanity, the drearily appalling Bebe seeming to merge with the dullness of the room. But there's an even more excruciating scene later, all the more powerful because so utterly downplayed. Otilia can't wriggle out of a visit to her boyfriend's parents: shattered by events but unable to let on, she sits at the dinner table surrounded by his perfectly pleasant, if overbearingly convivial family circle, and simply gazes blankly while the oppressive boom of jollity crashes over her. It's a marvellous example of what you might call "negative" acting from Anamaria Marinca; she virtually dissolves into the air as she sits there, yet we can't take our eyes off her. And the longer Mungiu holds this single take, the more we feel trapped together with Otilia.

The entire drama spans a single day from morning to night, and Mungiu's patient, unvarnished approach makes the film appear to be unreeling in real time, much as in that other recent steely example of Romanian realism, Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu. There are few laughs to be had – until the end credits, which reveal that 4 Months... is the first in a series entitled Tales from the Golden Age. Mungiu's dramatic masterstroke is his decision to focus not on Gabita, whose story you'd expect to follow, but on the friend who chooses to go through hell with her.

A harrowing film this may be, but it's not without a glimmer of light: in the callous society that Mungiu depicts, Otilia's actions represent an everyday heroism that offers hope for a better world. 4 Months... won't exactly send you out dancing on air, but this sparingly made, brilliantly acted, compelling drama is one of those rare films that remind you how much cinema still matters as a device for measuring the vital signs of humanity.