Following a movie year in which no fewer than three unexpected pregnancies ended in life-affirming birth scenes, Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days feels like a grim, communist-era breath of fresh air. The film won the Palm D'Or last year at Cannes, and is part of what is being heralded as a new wave in Romanian cinema. Such awards and accolades are well deserved. A remarkable, gritty realism pervades the simple story that unfolds over a single day and night of the Ceausescu era.

The film tells the story of a young woman, Otilia, helping her guileless technical school roommate, Gabita, obtain an illegal second trimester abortion in late-'80s Romania. But as we witness the complicated arrangements needed for Gabita to have the procedure done in secret, and see the grave consequences of some of the logistical mishaps, a much larger picture is revealed—that of the daily struggle of living in Romania two years before the fall of communism.

The film's pitch-perfect naturalism doesn't just apply to life in communist Romania. A more universal realism also pervades, from the fraught friendship between Otilia and Gabita that grows increasingly complicated as the film's events unfold, to Otilia's contemptuous moments with her boyfriend. When she attends an awkward birthday dinner for his mother after her harrowing day, the political and class dynamics are specific to 1987 Romania, but the young couple's personal dynamics transcend the time.

The actors speak in such natural, slightly hushed tones, seemingly unaware of Mungiu's camera and the film's long takes, that there's a sense we are overhearing real conversations; we are the proverbial fly on the wall, transported back two decades and across continents.

The film departs subtly from its intense realism when Otilia must go out into the night to dispose of her friend's aborted fetus (yes, you will see an aborted fetus onscreen, and it's a necessary, honest moment). She walks in and out of pools of light, and every noise in the night is intensified; we feel her being watched. There's a sense, as if in a horror film, that anything could happen.

In the film's final scene, Otilia tells Gabita, "Let's never talk about this." For the audience, however, the film leaves plenty to discuss.