Although the 2007 Romanian film with the unusual title 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was the recipient of many major awards, including Best Foreign Language Film from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and was nominated for a Golden Globe, you have probably never heard of it. I hadn’t until not so long ago when I was browsing through the Netflix Watch Instantly listings and found the title oddly intriguing.

It was actually a good thing that I knew nothing about the film. Part of the wonder of it is how the story unfolds without any of the usual expository dialogue or even any visual cues that reveal the kind of movie it is. All you know from the initial scenes is that a college girl living in a dormitory has a problem and that a female friend is determined to help her solve it.

You don’t want to know any more than that. Believe me. Learning anything further about the plot will dampen the movie’s impact. Don’t even read the Netflix blurb because it gives too much away.

What I can say without spoiling anything is that a fascinating aspect of this film, from a sociological perspective, is the glimpse it gives us into what life was like in Romania in the 1980s under the totalitarian dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. His government was hellbent on controlling every facet of people’s lives. According to the website everything2.com, “Romanian citizenry was appalled at these policies, but were kept in check by the Securitate, his secret police, who kept almost 15% of the population as paid informants.”

The year 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the larger Iron Curtain that had draped Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. Before that fall, life was tainted by a pervasive kind of visceral fear that is rendered — in such a way that we can feel it — by the performances of Laura Vasiliu and Anamaria Marinca as the two friends in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The supporting cast is suitably suspicious, and Cristian Mungiu’s direction visually captures the gray dreariness of the Communist atmosphere that soaks into the very bones of the characters.