‘Triumph’ Review: Maria Bakalova Seeks an Alien Connection in Bulgaria’s Eccentric Oscar Submission

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic The fall of communism in Bulgaria wasn’t a clean break, exactly: With the country’s Communist Party having relinquished its political monopoly in 1989 to make way for a parliamentary democracy, it still won the country’s first free elections the following year.

The panic brought on by unfamiliar liberties spirals to chaotic effect in “Triumph,” a thoroughly singular political satire from Bulgarian directing duo Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, in which old-school power structures and preposterous new-age thinking grind each other down to a vain stalemate.

Original and outlandish if only fitfully funny, the film rests considerably on the deadpan comic stylings of Oscar-nominated star (and producer) Maria Bakalova, returning to her homeland for the first time since 2021’s “Women Do Cry.” Inspired by real events — even if little about its frenzied, heightened tone suggests as much — “Triumph” is the concluding entry in Grozeva and Valchanov’s stated “newspaper clippings trilogy,” in which each film is expanded from some sensational tabloid item in Bulgaria’s media history. (The previous entries were 2014’s “The Lesson” and 2016’s “Glory” — the latter was the country’s official Oscar submission, as is “Triumph” this year.) Certainly, this peculiar tale of a collapsing military mission in pursuit of extra-terrestrial contact can feel pulled from the pages of the National Enquirer or its nearest Balkan equivalent, with a bizarro storytelling sensibility that distinguishes the film from its more muted predecessors.