The story is very simple. Mr. Lazarescu, an older man, has been suffering from bad headaches for several days and finally feels the need to call an ambulance to take him to the hospital. Three times hospitals refer him to other hospitals with the excuses of being too full, not having enough staff, or not having the right equipment. When Mr. Lazarescu arrives at hospital B from hospital A, the first comment at hospital B is to ask why he was brought there, since hospital A is the better place for him. It is only through the persistence of the nurse in the ambulance that Mr. Lazarescu is not just put on a gurney and left to suffer and die.A major challenge of the movie is that Lazarescu is not a real sympathetic character--he is an unkempt alcoholic living alone with nobody who much cares for him. He loves his cats and seems to make an effort with an unresponsive sister. but a daughter in Canada is, for reasons unknown, totally out of the picture. We never know how Lazarescu wound up in his sorry state, but in many ways this is crucial to the power of the film, since it forces you to address the question of the value of each individual life, no matter how ordinary. You can understand how easy it would be to dismiss this seemingly insignificant man. Indeed, most of the health care providers tended to view Lazarescu as a problem that they would just as soon not deal with, and from their perspective of being overworked and overwhelmed and having to fill out multiple forms, you could see where they were coming from. But you keep being brought back to the realization that here is a human being in pain who needs help and, except for the nurse, that is not a big concern of those whose job it is to provide that help.I was sobered by the comment from the doctor who said that he needed Lazarescu's signature in order to operate unless he was incapable of signing, so they might want to drive him around for awhile until he was incapable.The questions brought up about health care are enough to drive you crazy. How much care should a country provide for each of its citizens in light of the fact that doing everything for everybody will ultimately bankrupt the country? I think Lazarescu would have gotten better care in the United States, since hospitals are required to admit patients to the emergency room, but unless significant reforms are put in place, it is only a matter of time where the situation in the U.S. will be just as portrayed in Romania as in this movie.It's hard to watch this without thinking that someday you may be in Lazarescu's situation. The line from the movie that still haunts me was from the doctor who commented that Lazarescu's hematoma should be operated on so he could then go home and later die of colon cancer. I am sure that if I were in Lazarescu's place, I would want the pain to go away. But so I could live to die a painful death over the next year? I found any humor to be had here to be very black.

Dull, demeaning, even if it is realistic. I can't believe this is marketed as a comedy, or reviewed as 'art', or even poetic and kafkaesque. I was actually given this DVD as a gift, and for the first time ever, I actually threw out a DVD. You can only find this funny if you have not been in that situation. If you have, it's tragic, and not in the least entertaining. As much as it is a reality that "we all have to bite the dust some time", dignity should be part of that ending of our lives. Watching a man die in agony, alone, was not an example of the inevitability of our mortality; I could not just shrug and press stop. An embarrassment to Romania, a disappointment to my friends and I, and a waste of time for anyone.

I just want to respond the first comment (or at least the comment marked as "most useful"), saying that this is not a movie about reality on a post-Comunist country. This is a movie about reality in countries that don't belong to the first Word. I come from Argentina, and my country has never been run as a communist country. Every president we had might have had politics different than other countries, but certainly, never even *near* communism. And that *happens*. It happens *every single day*. Do you know why I didn't enjoyed that movie? Because I couldn't stop thinking that at least half of the population in my country has no chance but to assist to public hospitals and suffer that luck *every day*. I'm lucky I belong to a middle class that can afford private hospitals, but as I see on the news, people go to hospitals at five in the morning to ask for an appointment with a doctor. And I see how doctors who work at public hospitals are frustrated when they can't help their patients because hospital doesn't have the appropriate equipment. It's really sad. It's not post-communism. It's reality at third word countries (and third word doesn't always mean we are from the African country where they are all starving, cause we are doing just fine. We're not that bad.) And the reason these countries have this issues is because, well, like you've seen our economy minister saying it on TV, the big boys are trying to keep us down.I do hope that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu has changed something in our head. It's not just a movie, It's almost a documentary... Because i can assure you that is a real story. Not a reality show, a real story.

For anyone who has made a trip to or has accompanied a loved one to the emergency room, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" may be too realistic to bear.A few years ago, my family called the ambulance for one of our relatives. He was having vague back pain -- we couldn't get him to communicate with us about it. He didn't want to go to the hospital, but his pain was too great for him not to. He is an alcoholic, and to this day lives under the assumption that none of us know he's an alcoholic, so I think his fear of the hospital had somewhat to do with the fear that his "secret" would be exposed. We ended up in a living hell of smug doctors, each with a different diagnosis of his condition, but who were all in agreement that the patient should be treated like dirt because of his addiction. If he wasn't going to care about his own health, they seemed to think, then why should they? So needless to say, despite the fact that it takes place in Romania, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" hit frightfully close to home for me, as it's about a lonely, alcoholic man and his nighttime trip into the purgatory of emergency-room bureaucracy. The foreign setting aside, this film could have taken place in the USA and been no different. Nobody has time for Mr. Lazarescu, everyone has a different theory as to what is wrong with him, the nurses are more interested in making sure paperwork is filled out than they are in taking care of the living, breathing human being suffering -- and perhaps dying -- on the stretcher in front of them. In one scene, the doctors insult and belittle the ambulance nurse when she tries to offer her own assessment of Mr. Lazarescu's condition, holding their advanced schooling over and against her. We don't learn much about Mr. Lazarescu, and so we see events occur from the perspective of this paramedic who takes charge of him and carts him from one hospital to the next in a desperate attempt to find one that will treat him. To her, Mr. Lazarescu is a job, yet she's the closest thing to a caring relative he has, so cold and indifferent is the rest of the health care world.This film is astonishing in its meticulous detail, and it's hard to believe it's not a documentary, something out of the world of Fredrick Wiseman. Most scenes are filmed in long takes, the camera standing back at an objective distance simply capturing the whirl of human activity taking place around it. The acting is amazing, for the very reason that no one seems to be acting. It's a deeply unsettling film; we know Mr. Lazarescu will likely die -- from cancer if not from the surgery he's about to undergo when the film closes, and anyway, the title tells us as much. But we don't see him die in the film -- the last scene is of him being washed, shaved and dressed for surgery, a human being reduced to a slab of living flesh on a table, robbed of even his last shred of dignity, while no one appears to care. Somehow, that lack of closure is one of the most unsettling things in the film; it captures the feeling one has when you've finally gotten your loved one to the hospital and all you can do is wait, not sure whether or not you're going to see him alive again.Grade: A