Watching a pensioner vomit blood into his slippers might not be every꧅one's idea of a Friday night at the flicks, but stay w💫ith The Death Of Mr Lazarescu. Allow Cristi Puiu's Bucharest-set odyssey to shuffle its way through the entire two-and-a-half hours of its magisterially mournful funeral parade and you'll be rewarded with the sight of our eponymous zero pissing, then shitting, his pants.

Which is a facetious way of admitting that Lazarescu is tough viewing. It is, after all, a film about the final hours of a banal life, shot in suitably lifeless colours and comprised entirely of interiors (the old man's cramped flat, an amb🤪ulance, hospitals). Its camera is handheld but resolutely unflustered, its pacing determinedly languid despite the (almost) real-time structure, and its performances naturalistic and sombre rather than charismatic: any star wattage here is of the five-watt-bulb-wreathed-in-cobwebs variety.

Which makes Lazarescu the anti-ER (written by Mike Leig🗹h, directed by John Cassavetes, edited by Jim Jarmusch...), its numb, lethargic doctors treating the semi-comatose Lazarescu with disintereꦕst, even contempt. Overworked and underpaid, the staff have neither the time nor energy to get excited over a smelly old man who continues to drink despite a history of stomach ulcers.

To some, this migꦿht sound like an exercise in screen miserablism - and pretentious miserablism at that, given the glaringly symbolic names of several of its protagonists (Lazarescu, Dante, Dr Anghel). It's not, Puiu saving his film from a death of cheerless, con𒐪temptible pomposity by gulping in huge life breaths of warmth and wit, compassion and dignity.

It's this ability to marry welcome humanism to a surgical dissection of the Romanian health service that marks L🌄azarescu as one to watch. Well, that and the vomit i🐻n the slippers...