Politics in Jelena Maksimović’s Until the Day Ends rarely settles into speeches or manifestos. It moves through bodies, rooms, affiliations, and, most strikingly, a paving stone passed from hand to hand during a protest until the question of ownership becomes almost meaningless. Lena holds it. Others carry it. Stefan throws it. A policeman falls. A camera records Lena with the object, and suddenly political responsibility has acquired the visual grammar of mistaken identity.
That sequence is the film’s clearest statement of intent because Maksimović treats political division as something both ideological and physical. Twenty-year-old Lena is part of Belgrade’s student protest movement, occupying a university amid demonstrations rooted in anger at government corruption and the deaths caused by the Novi Sad railway-station canopy collapse.
Stefan moves among right-wing loyalists and skinheads while insisting that he is apolitical. The claim sounds ridiculous to Lena, and reasonably so. Spending your evenings beside extremists does tend to weaken the neutrality defence.
Yet Stefan’s vagueness matters. He is surrounded by political identity without appearing to possess much of his own, while Lena’s convictions are far firmer. Maksimović uses that imbalance to prevent their attraction from becoming immediately absurd. Stefan can move toward Lena because his loyalties were never especially deep. Lena has further to travel, which gives their connection its friction.
Their first interactions establish that distance without turning hostility into melodrama. Lena returns from the occupied university to discover that her brother Milan has sold her piano to Stefan to settle a debt. Milan sneers at her activism, Stefan absorbs Lena’s mockery, and the social boundaries separating these young people prove strangely porous. Lena may regard Stefan and his friends as idiots, yet she can still smoke with him. Political hostility already shares space with familiarity. Then the protest transforms proximity into culpability.
Maksimović and cinematographer Paul Spengemann follow the paving stone through the crowd with such velocity that perception itself becomes unreliable. The shot is technically ostentatious, but the ostentation has purpose. Violence moves faster than moral certainty. By the time anyone understands what happened, Stefan has injured a policeman and Lena has become the face preserved by the recording. The camera has captured evidence while missing truth.
That distinction sits comfortably inside a film fascinated by seeing and misseeing. Spengemann frequently pushes bodies behind glass, reflections, flare, shadows, and restless camera movement. Faces rarely occupy uncontested visual space. Belgrade itself feels fractured into partial views.
The heavy lens flare can become exhausting, occasionally suggesting a cinematographer unwilling to let a clean image survive unmolested, but the underlying visual logic remains persuasive. These characters live in a political atmosphere where every affiliation casts suspicion across whatever stands beside it.
Maksimović’s documentary background gives the protest material an immediacy that occasionally clashes with this expressive camera. The occupation, the streets, the crowds, and the mostly non-professional performers create the sensation of events being caught rather than staged.
Then a circular pan, coloured light, or flamboyant optical effect announces construction with equal force. That tension becomes part of the film’s personality. Its realism is never pure observation. It keeps contaminating itself with romanticism. The most obvious contamination is Lena and Stefan themselves.
After police scatter protesters and counterprotesters, the two flee together, and the film slowly exchanges political confrontation for an awkward nocturnal intimacy. Their connection avoids most expected romantic gestures. There is little conventional physical fulfilment, and their time together keeps getting disrupted by argument, danger, strangers, and uncertainty. Even their ride out of the city comes courtesy of a priest delivering a reactionary sermon against an impressive catalogue of perceived evils, from migrants to television cartoons. Serbia’s ideological noise follows them down the road.
The lack of romantic neatness saves the relationship. Maksimović does not provide a tidy fantasy in which affection dissolves political difference. Lena and Stefan are drawn together because crisis has stripped away some of the identities surrounding them, not because those identities have ceased to matter.
Andrija Krivokapić makes Stefan’s uncertainty readable without turning him into an innocent accidentally misplaced among fascists. Lena Trifunović has the more difficult task. Her Lena is politically assured but personally unsettled, and Trifunović’s stare often conveys resistance even when the character has stopped arguing.
That force occasionally exceeds the credibility of the scene around her. At a far-right hangout, Lena’s defiance is enough to command a room of hostile young men who seem suddenly mesmerised by her nerve. The moment wants charisma to function like armour. It almost does, largely because Trifunović has the presence to sell the fantasy for several seconds. The realism still bends.
The weakness points toward a wider limitation. Stefan receives ambiguity; several men around him remain crude representations of reactionary aggression. The protest movement, meanwhile, provides danger, urgency, and ethical orientation without receiving much detailed political examination. Maksimović appears less interested in explaining contemporary Serbia than in watching young people form identities inside its fractures. That focus produces a stronger drama, though it narrows the film’s political reach. The streets carry history. The screenplay prefers the people running through them.
Once Lena and Stefan leave Belgrade, the visual scheme begins to loosen. Darkness recedes. Light returns. Their surroundings become less claustrophobic, and the camera’s relationship with them feels less combative. It would be easy to read that transition as simple optimism, yet the film remains too unsettled for such certainty. Nothing about their flight has repaired the political world they left behind, and nothing establishes that their attraction can survive outside the temporary suspension created by danger.
Maksimović eventually abandons strict naturalism for a sustained final image that reaches toward generational hope. The gesture risks feeling imposed on a film whose strongest passages have thrived on contradiction. Still, the image refuses the comfort of a solved romance or a solved country. What remains is a younger generation standing in uncertain light, carrying histories it did not create and choices it has barely begun to understand.
Until the Day Ends had its world premiere at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 2026. Set against the backdrop of Serbian anti-corruption protests, the coming-of-age drama follows two young people on opposing sides as they flee Belgrade.
Full Credits
Title: Until the Day Ends
Distributor: Heretic
Release date: September 10, 2026 (Venice International Film Festival)
Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes
Director: Jelena Maksimović
Writers: Jelena Maksimović, Olga Dimitrijević, Ivan Salatić
Producers and Executive Producers: Jelena Angelovski
Cast: Lena Trifunović, Andrija Krivokapić, Irina Hotomski, Stefan Tarabić, Nataša Čakardić, Miodrag Dragičević
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Paul Spengemann
Editors: Jan Klemsche
The Review
Until the Day Ends
Until the Day Ends is strongest when political identity becomes something visible, unstable, and dangerous: a stone crossing hands, a body caught in the wrong frame, a city fractured by glass and flare. Maksimović occasionally lets visual bravado and romantic symbolism bend the realism too far, and the politics surrounding Lena and Stefan remain less developed than their attraction. Still, the film’s restless camera, Trifunović’s commanding presence, and refusal of easy reconciliation give its hope real tension.
PROS
- Striking visual language
- Excellent cobblestone sequence
- Strong central chemistry
- Trifunović’s intense performance
- Politically charged atmosphere
CONS
- Excessive lens flare
- Secondary extremists feel broad
- Political context remains underexplored
- Some heightened moments strain credibility
