The scene in which the little girl, Maria, goes missing in Romanian director Constantin Popescu‘s brutally effective, profoundly depressing San Sebastian Competition title “Pororoca” is a movie unto itself. Like most of this 2h30m film’s pivotal scenes, it runs long — extraordinarily so — and its single-take, handheld nature, that ranges from steady and amused, to sinister and watchful, to panicking and juddery, challenges us to locate the exact moment at which everything goes wrong: the exact time the chatty little blonde girl, having wandered out of frame so many times, suddenly never wanders back in.

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