‘Black Money For White Nights’ review: Absurdist drama reckons with Bulgaria’s culture of corruption | Reviews

Dirs: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov. Bulgaria/Greece. 2026. 94mins

The latest picture from Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe winners Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov explores rot at the heart of Bulgarian society, filtered through an absurdist spiral of misfortune laced with flashes of bleak humour. Sixty-something maternity nurse Marina (Tanya Shahova) and her partner, railway station master Gosha (Ivan Savov), have taken their fair share of backhanders – enough to finance the trip of a lifetime, to experience the ‘White Nights’ in Russia. Then Russia declares war on Ukraine and the travel agency collapses, taking with it the couple’s savings. For Gosha, it is a problem to be fixed through ever-increasing bribes. For Marina, it is a reckoning for past sins. 

Vivid characterisation, brisk pacing and eye-catching design elevate what could have been a bit of a downer

Grozeva and Valchanov return to Karlovy Vary’s main competition with their fifth feature, having carried off the Crystal Globe in 2019 with The Father. The directing duo also achieved success with 2014 debut The Lesson, earning the prize for best fresh directors in San Sebastian, as well as awards from Thessaloniki, Tokyo and several others.

The knotty moral questions facing ordinary Bulgarians are a recurring theme in the pair’s films, which tend to focus on the lower end of the food chain of financial impropriety. But the rich characterisation, brisk pacing and eye-catching design elevate what could, otherwise, have been a bit of a downer. The hapless Marina and Gosha might not make it to Russia, but a well festival journey for their story seems likely.

There is an accepted protocol for bribes in Marina’s maternity hospital. “Not here,” she says firmly as a fretting father-to-be attempts to thrust bulging envelopes her way. But a few steps away, sheltered by the staircase and away from prying eyes, she accepts the cash, redistributing the offerings among her colleagues. It is a bit of a pantomime, this suggestion that Marina might find herself punished for accepting the cash. In fact, the opposite is true, as Marina discovers when, struck by an inconvenient late-onset attack of moral qualms, she decides to stop taking the ‘contributions’.

The bribes, together with the banknotes Gosha pockets for turning a blind eye to diesel siphoning, are placed in a biscuit tin, hidden at the back of the couple’s wood-burning stove. It is a perceptive little detail in a picture that is evocatively designed throughout. Marina and Gosha’s apartment is boldly decorated, with a stridently upbeat colour palette of green and orange, and birch forest wallpaper adorning the living room. It is here, with plates of finger food, that Marina shows off her wardrobe for the trip – a intelligent jacket for the Pushkin museum, a leopard print fraudulent fur for high tea. And it is here, watching the news later on, that they first hear of the invasion. And the birch forest walls start closing in on their trip.

The picture has an atmospherically lived-in look, with the directors making colourful employ of their locations, both in Sofia and in the boondocks where Marina and Gosha make their home. But equally impressive is the employ of sound, with the recurring motif of discordant church bells evoking Marina’s guilt and superstition, and the sound of a food blender weaponised as the final word in a bitter argument.

Marina is distraught when it becomes clear they have been scammed out of their savings. But what rubs salt into the wound is that the circumstances of the disaster force her back into contact with her semi-estranged sister. Long-buried grudges soon re-emerge, and with them the secrets Marina has kept from her husband. There is a relentless, despondent downward slide in the couple’s unfortunate circumstances. But having pushed them to the brink, the filmmakers pull the couple back at the last minute. Marina and Gosha have lost their savings, employment and a substantial chunk of their dignity. But at least they have each other.