His American thriller, Basic Instinct, is a feature - length echo of an earlier Dutch film, The Fourth Man, both Hitchcockian arcs of anxiety that take place in the vivid and rapidly unraveling realities of unstable men; Sharon Stone's hair in Basic Instinct's
police interrogation scene looks like a deliberate reconstruction of Renee Soutendijk's hairstyle in The Fourth Man, which is scraped back into a severe, androgynous polygon.
With its icy photography and handheld camerawork, Mungiu's film is shot in typical Romanian New Wave style, and certain
scenes (the litany of sins, the
police interrogation) may well lead Beyond the Hills to be seen as both a summation and an exemplary instance of the movement's aesthetic tendencies.