Andrew O’Hehir, Salon | “I guess 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days will forever be labeled ‘the Romanian abortion movie’: it’s 1987 and two college roommates, Otilia and Gabita, must descend into the hellish underside of Ceauçescu’s totalitarian state to secure Gabita an illegal abortion. But that description might lead you to expect a certain kind of form—either Dickensian social drama or deliberately dreary, vérité-style realism. Even some people who’ve seen it seem to have missed the fact that it’s a carefully plotted thriller, as ingeniously constructed as a Hitchcock movie. (Maybe the Academy’s foreign-language selection committee did grasp this. After all, if 4 Months really were a soporific, vitamin-packed message movie about abortion, it would surely have gotten an Oscar nomination.)”
Arya Ponto, Just Press Play | “Pro-life or pro-choice, the argument feels like a distraction in what little space these women have. When you’re terrified out of your wits, there’s no time to argue what’s socially acceptable—you just chase the most logical solution you can think of. The film concerns itself only with the harrowing details of what Otilia and Gabita have to endure to reach that solution, and not the implications.”
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker | “The film becomes a concise survey of how to deal with the worst. Do you cave in helplessly, like Gabita? Do you sour into something nastier than the system that bred you, like the abortionist Mr. Bebe? Or do you summon your depleted energy, like Otilia, and brave it out? If so, are we allowed to imagine her, two years later, crowding with tens of thousands of others in front of the Central Committee building and howling down a tyrant? You bet.”
Armond White, New York Press | “Remember how the Sex Pistols’ ‘Bodies’ refused to sanction abortion as a social privilege, but scorned it as horrific, inhumane, a moral burden? Remember Mike Leigh’s 2004 Vera Drake distilling the abortion question into the rich aesthetic inquiry of Imelda Staunton’s hyper-clear close-up? Next to those pop landmarks, 4 Months’ ‘realism’ is insipid. It’s a throwback to the naïveté of nascent feminism (Otilia stays angry at her sympathetic boyfriend) and lacks the emotional stability of such pre-feminist abortion films as Love With the Proper Stranger or The L-Shaped Room. By sentimentalizing Otilia and Gabita’s ignorant choices, Mungiu insults reality. For those who believe in abortion, Otilia and Gabita’s behavior needs no explanation; for those who don’t, none is offered. When a Romanian film is as obtuse as 4, 3, 2, it feels like a countdown to cinema’s termination.”
