When the speeding motorist’s car hit the 14-year-old boy at some 150 kmh, the body flew up 26 metres in the air before hitting the ground. This parabola foreshadows the emotional journey taken by the motorist’s mother, Cornelia, in CHILD’S POSE, the latest film by Romanian director Calin Peter Netzer.

At the start of the film, 60-year-old Cornelia (Luminata Gheorghiu) is polished, accomplished and secure in her arty middle-class lifestyle as she slags off adult son Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache) to her sister Olga (Natasa Raab). The scene in which Cornelia describes their combative relationship is a crash course for anyone wanting to learn Romanian swear words; and it’s the fallout from the car crash in which her son is involved that by the end of the film will see her reduced to a sniveling emotional wreck. But this is the price she willingly pays for defending her “baby” against the “hyenas” in the legal system who are circling her son and trying to bring him down.

CHILD’S POSE is studded with milestone emotional encounters between Cornelia and those closest to her: husband, son and son’s live-in-girlfriend. This last contains an incredibly frank description of the breakdown of a marriage using ejaculation, semen and condoms as brutally honest and emotionally naked metaphors. These encounters however are in marked contrast to the businesslike transactions which Cornelia uses to single-handedly attempt to save her son from the maw of the  Romanian legal system – transactions for which her son refuses to be grateful, instead viewing them as one more way for her to maintain her grip on him.

Only towards the end of the film do we get sense of what the suffocating environment in which the son has been brought up and of how the mother is as much in the wrong as the son.

Much of the film is shot in offices, apartments and cars in an authentic handheld style, the often harsh and brittle sound giving an added layer of realism. Gheorghiu is magnificent as Cornelia and thoroughly convincing in her portrayal of the lengths to which a mother will go for a child, while Dumitrache excels as her podgy spoilt brat of a son.

Netzer stretches the audience’s ability to handle emotional pain to almost breaking point through his perfectly paced directing – the film ends not a moment too soon. CHILD’S POSE’s intensity is on par with that of 2012’s harrowing French-language film Amour, which focuses on the elderly Georges and his terminally-ill wife Anne.

CHILD’S POSE opens on Thursday May 15 at the Palace Verona, Paddington and at the Palace Norton Street, Leichardt.