Catrinel Marlon, Rodica Lazar, Vlad Ivanov
From writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest; Police, Adjective) comes the highly acclaimed, thoroughly entertaining The Whistlers.
Part high stakes thriller, part bone-dry black comedy, it follows Cristi (played by veteran Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov), a corrupt police inspector in Bucharest who has become involved in the mafia deals he is supposed to have been investigating. Now under suspicion by his colleagues and drawn into a high stakes heist by the glamorous and enigmatic Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), he finds himself travelling to La Gomera, a Spanish island where he must learn the local dialect – the secret whistling language, silbo – in order to pull off the biggest deal of his life.
Screened in Competition at Cannes 2019, The Whistlers has been hailed as Porumboiu’s most accessible, crowd-pleasing film to date. Quixotic, niftily plotted and frequently surreal, flitting pleasingly between cloud-covered Bucharest and sunny La Gomera, it’s an elegant and stylishly crafted piece of entertainment.
