The feature film Beyond the Hills, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is a joint Romanian, French, and Belgian co-production masterfully crafted within the drama genre. Winner of the Best Screenplay and Best Actress awards at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the film is adapted from a non-fiction novel titled Deadly Confessions. The narrative is set in 2003, capturing a specific historical juncture in Eastern Europe when Romania was undergoing a devastating economic crisis. Within this backdrop, two young women, Voichița and Alina, attempt—each in her own way—to escape the economic and emotional quagmire engulfing them.
Every character in the film grapples with poverty in one form or another, a systemic vulnerability that ensnares them in exploitative relationships—one within the church, and the other within the pornography industry. Here, the audience is confronted with two seemingly disparate phenomena: religion and sexual exploitation. While these appear contradictory at first glance, the narrative unfolds to reveal numerous frames depicting the systemic exploitation of the convent’s women by the Orthodox priest. Voichița, much like the other women in the monastery, passively submits to grueling labor and devotion. This objectified behavior, deeply rooted in traditional Christian dogmas, finds a clear reflection in a passage from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:
“Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head. A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority on her head.”
From the author’s perspective, the aforementioned passage underscores that within Christian doctrine, women are relegated to a lower human status than men, attaining recognition only when a male figure acts as an intermediary between them and Christ. Women are required to demonstrate their obedience and submission by covering their hair.
Yet, while such an overt patriarchal gaze is no longer universally practiced among most modern Christian adherents, one must ask: why does this cinematic work emphasize it so intensely? To understand this, it is necessary to analyze the character of Alina, the other young woman in the film.
Alina represents a generation in Europe that refuses to be bound by the rigid doctrines of the Orthodox Church; she visits the church only sporadically. She has never confessed, and throughout the film, she exhibits no trace of guilt regarding her same-sex relationship. The narrative implies that prior to Voichița entering the convent, the two shared an intimate sexual relationship and had resolved to build a life together by earning a living working on a ship.
However, Voichița’s sudden pivot toward religiosity and the convent leaves Alina utterly traumatized. Tracking the sequence of events in the film primes the viewer to perceive religion as an absolute deterrent and a violation of human rights. Yet, the critical nuance lies in how the director attempts to isolate religion as the sole obstacle to the protagonists’ liberation. By downplaying the severity of Alina’s poverty, the film frames her sexual exploitation in the “free world” outside the church as a peripheral issue—essentially presenting it as her own autonomous choice. Consequently, a visceral revulsion is directed exclusively toward religious dogma, subtly inducing the audience to believe that if Voichița were to simply abandon the church, a happy ending would await her. This holds true whether that idealized ending entails working on a ship, as previously agreed, or earning a living by stripping in front of a photographer’s camera.
The director utilizes every available cinematic tool—including lighting, mise-en-scène, set design, editing, and dialogue—to construct the hell of the church against the heaven of Alina’s abstract ideals. Ultimately, Alina’s death drives the audience toward a grim conclusion: that there exists a third alternative—death. The surrogate offered for liberation from the status quo is human non-existence.
Human alienation (Entfremdung) in this work can be analyzed through two dimensions: the objective and the subjective. In the previously cited passage from Paul’s epistle, we witness the construction of a mechanical chain that tragically dismantles independent human identity. The subordination of woman to man, man to Christ, and Christ to God establishes a rigid hierarchy, reducing human beings to mere cogs in a machine that can only function through interconnected friction.
We are witnessing a process in which humanity exercises no autonomous agency. The historical reality of the brutal, dehumanizing rule of the Church in past centuries—where even empirical inquiries required papal authorization—is well-documented. This structural mechanism engineered a profound alienation within the human psyche. Over centuries, this cognitive framework was transmitted across social structures from one generation to the next. Modern humanity continues to carry this historical baggage by tradition, instinctively seeking refuge in this sanctuary during crises, oblivious to the fact that they are relying on a fragile infrastructure threatened by a catastrophic collapse.
Throughout the film, Voichița’s psyche is repeatedly tempted toward the collapse of this internal structure (channeled through the temptation to accept a sexual relationship with Alina). Yet, each time, a flawed psychological defense mechanism postpones the ruin of this sanctuary. This self-deception culminates at the end of the film with the quasi-angelic intervention of the police and the arrest of the priest.
On the other hand, we witness an objective form of alienation manifesting through Alina’s systematic isolation. Modern humanity drifts increasingly toward atomization. Karl Marx, in his early works such as On the Jewish Question and The Holy Family, meticulously detailed this trajectory. In this domain, Marx critiqued Adam Smith’s theoretical framework, which conceptualized human society as a commercial enterprise where every individual operates as a merchant pursuing personal profit. Although Marx rejected Smith’s premise, he viewed it as the definitive manifesto of capitalism, exposing the cynical mockery it inflicts upon genuine human community.
Alina is reduced to an alienated pawn who links her entire prospect of happiness to working on a ship and living alongside Voichița. As noted earlier, a deep chasm opens between her authentic self and her social self; throughout the film, she is depicted merely as an isolated “citizen” and a solitary atomized unit of society. The objective alienation embodied by these characters manifests as the emotional alienation of individuals like Alina, whose expression of love is pathologized as madness by observers, while the surrounding social systems systematically drive her into exile.
At one point in the film, she even surrenders her meager worldly possessions to the church, after which the priest finally accepts her as a member of the congregation. Though her life takes a radically different turn, this moment evokes Marx’s profound assertion in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:
“This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces… confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer… The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him.”
It is within this framework that one can discern the functional role of religion within capitalist relations: through its internal mechanisms, it conditions the individual to endure exploitation, ultimately guiding them to accept this subjugation as a natural state of affairs.
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