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Minimal science fiction: Saulė Bliuvaitė and Radu Jude, toxic futures and contaminated bodies

“Perhaps this is where the most necessary science fiction today resides: one that does not promise salvation or fantasies of purity, but invites us to understand that toxicity is not an accident, but the price of a progress that refuses to die. Bliuvaitė and Jude, each in their own way, remind us that the toxic future is not a destination but a state of matter. To inhabit it requires, like their cinema, looking without filters, laughing at the irredeemable, and holding onto the question: what do we do with this residue that we are?”

Por Kristine Balduzzi

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In a global cinematic landscape marked by hyper-technological dystopias and spectacular catastrophe scenarios, the science fiction of Saulė Bliuvaitė and Radu Jude unfolds as a minimal, ironic, and deeply material way of thinking about the present. Far from Hollywood’s spectacle, their works piece together scraps of the real world—residues of images and fragments of bodies exposed to everyday toxicity. In this unlikely alliance between a young Lithuanian filmmaker and one of Eastern Europe’s most incisive directors, the same gesture emerges: to imagine contaminated futures not as a distant projection but as a tainted present that already erodes the skin and the gaze. In Toxic, Bliuvaitė crafts a choreography where young bodies move through decomposed industrial landscapes, rusting factories, and wastelands that seem like survivors of an unannounced collapse. There is no heroic plot to rescue them, no narrative device to save them: the story is fragmentary, drifting between broken conversations, grainy images, and dense silences that become atmosphere. The body here is not just a visual support but the terrain where the traces of a poisoned environment are inscribed: cracked skin, sweat, toxic dust. Toxicity, far from being a distant allegory, becomes texture and breath.

For his part, Radu Jude—especially in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World—stands out as a fierce chronicler of a world saturated with information, images, and symbolic violence. His formal radicalism springs from the accumulation and abrupt montage of materials: found footage, backstage recordings, memes, fragments of television. In Jude’s work, dystopia is not built through parallel worlds but seeps into the banality of the office, into the exhaustion of a production assistant who must shoot a corporate video, into the resignation of workers who accept precarious labor conditions without protest. In his cinema, the toxic future is not a looming threat: it is bureaucracy, marketing, the empty discourse that devours dignity. Both directors share a fundamental intuition: science fiction does not need special effects, spaceships, or autonomous artificial intelligences to disturb us. It is enough to film the remnants: industrial ruins, bodies already carrying contamination in their blood, words that fail in their promise of a better tomorrow. In Bliuvaitė, this minimalism materializes in stripped-down, almost abstract landscapes where humanity seems to drift aimlessly. In Jude, visual and verbal saturation turns dystopia into a constant buzz—an excess that exposes the farce of a progress that keeps proclaiming itself while everything falls apart.

Although their approaches differ—she favors contemplation and the poetics of space, he favors biting irony and an overload of signs—both share a sharp political awareness. For Bliuvaitė, toxicity is inseparable from the post-Soviet industrial legacy, from environmental degradation as a scar of an exhausted economic project. In Jude’s work, the poison spreads through language: political correctness turned into cynicism, advertising that glosses over exploitation, corporate morality presented as progress while perpetuating inequality. Their contaminated futures are not distant—they sprout from the ground their characters walk on, from the conversations they hold, from the silences they endure. There is also, in both, a generational gesture: a disenchanted but not nihilistic gaze. In Toxic, young people wander without a clear horizon, but their bodies endure through closeness, through touch, through the possibility of inventing fleeting communities among ruins. It is not about the epic of resistance but about shared fragility. In Jude, laughter (acidic, bitter, but laughter nonetheless) becomes the minimal antidote to suffocation. In his cinema, laughter disrupts the homogeneous flow of official discourse, tears through the screen, and exposes the rot at the heart of corporate language. This minimal science fiction distances itself from the genre understood as spectacular escapism. Bliuvaitė and Jude dismantle the illusion of a clear border between reality and fiction: the dystopian future is not a backdrop but the inevitable residue of a modernity already spent. Their political imagination does not project grandiose solutions or savior heroes. Instead, it suggests that the only possible fissure is played out in form: in the grainy texture of an image that refuses to beautify disaster, in the dissonant editing that wounds the narrative’s linearity, in the refusal to offer a comforting ending.

Toxic breathes through youth: its characters are contaminated, yes, but they also radiate a fragile, almost mineral vitality. It is as if Bliuvaitė wants to tell us that toxicity does not only kill—it also generates new mutations. Bodies, traversed by residue and dust, become mutant bodies, forms of life that experiment with ways to inhabit disaster. The wasteland, more than a definitive ruin, becomes a precarious laboratory for imagining other connections: among humans, with the land, with what remains. In Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Jude turns toxicity into noise. His protagonist, a woman who films without rest, is both witness to and victim of a work structure that devours itself. Here, the toxic future is the impossibility of stopping the machine, the imposition of producing meaning (videos, slogans, empty laughs) even when everything is rotten. Jude finds a weapon in humor: he ridicules authority figures, exposes the brutality behind what calls itself “modern,” and celebrates contradiction as a form of truth. His dystopia is deeply present—a loop with no exit that consumes images and bodies alike.

At first glance, the dialogue between these two filmmakers might seem improbable: Lithuania and Romania, poetic contemplation and discursive satire, atmospheric minimalism and frenetic accumulation. Yet their meeting point lies in the decision to use science fiction not as a closed genre but as an expanded gesture: contamination is aesthetic, narrative, and political. In their hands, dystopia does not need distant futures—it manifests as what is already breathed, drunk, and filmed. The result is uncomfortable: there is no redemption, no catharsis. What remains is the insistence on staring at the rot head-on. In Bliuvaitė, the camera caresses the surface of the ruins; in Jude, images clash, interrupt, and contradict each other. Both propose a cinema that resists clarity: toxicity becomes a haze that clouds hope but also an invitation to invent other ways of seeing.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this intersection is that both directors understand that the most effective dystopia is not the one that explodes in a grand finale but the one that slowly erodes. In the face of supposedly looming collapses, climate crises, resource depletion, and global labor precarity, their films insist on a minimal gesture: to hold the camera steady, to open a space for detail, to amplify irony, to brush up against silence. In the work of Bliuvaitė and Jude, toxicity is the inheritance that late capitalism does not know how to manage. It is industrial waste and rotten discourse, barren landscapes and human resources slogans, exhausted bodies and offices open 24/7. The question is no longer how to escape this future, but how to keep inhabiting it without denying its corrosion. Their answer is formal: rough images, unfinished narratives, uncomfortable laughter. A cinema that offers no consolation but does offer a form of vigil—to look at the rot as the condition of possibility for imagining the other. In the cracked surface of Toxic and the saturated buzz of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, the same intuition can be sensed: if there is no clean outside, then we must learn to breathe within the poison. Perhaps here lies the most necessary science fiction today: one that does not promise salvation or fantasies of purity but invites us to understand that toxicity is not an accident but the price of a progress that refuses to die. Bliuvaitė and Jude, each in their own way, remind us that the toxic future is not a destination but a state of matter. To inhabit it requires, like their cinema, looking without filters, laughing at the irredeemable, and holding onto the question: what do we do with this residue that we are?