Beginning with his third feature, Aferim! (2015), Romanian writer-director Radu Jude has seemed to reinvent himself with every new movie. Aferim! was a 19th-century picaresque filled with landscapes and shot in black-and-white widescreen; its follow-up, Scarred Hearts (2016), was a 20th-century chamber drama shot in the squarish Academy ratio (in which virtually all films were shot until the mid-50s) and notable for its devastating static long takes. Jude moved further into stasis with his next feature, the documentary The Dead Nation (2017), which considered Romania’s Jewish Holocaust (1941-1945) through a montage of still photographs from the 1930s and ’40s. That film generated a popular backlash in Romania, where, according to the filmmaker, many people refuse to acknowledge their country’s part in Europe’s Jewish genocide.

Barbarians gets off to a Brechtian start when Ioana Iacob, the actress playing Mariana, introduces herself to the camera and tells viewers to enjoy the film. Jude breaks the fourth wall only one more time in Barbarians, when Iacob looks directly at the camera after delivering a speech about victims of atrocity, but he employs other means of alienating viewers from the drama. Much of the film takes place during rehearsals for Mariana’s reenactment, and they’re rife with discussions of how to create an air of realism; when Mariana isn’t working, she’s reciting from books about historical atrocities and musing on her historical responsibility as a Romanian. In the film’s first extended sequence (shot in the sort of impressive long takes for which Romania’s art cinema is justly celebrated), Mariana meets with a government employee, Movila (Alexandru Dabija), who’s opposed to her reenactment. He first tries to convince her to choose another historical topic, then persuades her to tone down the violence in her drama when she refuses to relent. Their conversation is by turns intellectually charged and flirtatious; one of the movie’s better running gags is that the conservative Movila is not-so-secretly smitten with the sexy, radical Mariana.

Directed by Radu Jude. In Romanian with subtitles. 138 min. Facets Cinémathèque, 1517 W. Fullerton, 773-281-9075, facets.org, $10.