This is the film’s first deep insight: grief, in its most consuming form, is not a stage to be overcome but a parallel reality to be inhabited. Western cinema—from The Sixth Sense to A Ghost Story —typically frames the ghost as a problem to be solved. Fantoma Mea Iubita asks a more uncomfortable question: What if seeing your dead lover is not a symptom of trauma, but a choice of intimacy? To understand that choice, one must understand the silent architecture of Romanian emotional life. Răzvan, who grew up in the 1990s during the chaotic post-Ceaușescu transition, has spoken in interviews about the “emotional starvation” of the post-communist generation. “We were taught that feelings are inefficient,” she said in a rare press note. “Our parents survived by not feeling. We survived by not knowing how to feel.”
But to watch director Iulia Răzvan’s sophomore feature as a horror film is to misread its deepest intentions. Fantoma Mea Iubita (literal translation: My Beloved Ghost ) is not a ghost story. It is a grief story wearing a ghost’s skin. And in its quiet, devastating meditation on post-communist emotional illiteracy, it reveals something the streaming giant rarely allows: a portrait of love as a haunting we choose to endure. The plot is deceptively simple. Ana (Adina Simionescu), a thirty-something architect in Bucharest, loses her husband, Ștefan, in a mundane car accident. A year later, she begins to see him—not as a specter to be exorcised, but as a fully embodied presence who returns every evening at 9:17 PM. He makes coffee. He asks about her day. He lies beside her in silence. The rules are never explained. There is no vengeful spirit, no unresolved business, no medium to cross over. Ștefan simply is .
The message is cruel but honest: living bodies cannot compete with the ideal. The ghost asks nothing. He never snores, never leaves socks on the floor, never argues about money. He is pure presence—the ultimate male fantasy turned inside out, now weaponized as a woman’s prison. Why does this film belong on Netflix? On the surface, it seems like a poor fit for a platform whose algorithm rewards high-concept loglines (“A grieving architect falls in love with her dead husband’s ghost!”). But Fantoma Mea Iubita has quietly become a sleeper hit in Central and Eastern Europe, and its slow spread through word-of-mouth reveals something about the streaming economy’s blind spot. fantoma mea iubita netflix
Fantoma Mea Iubita is steeped in this legacy. Ștefan, when alive, was not a demonstrative man. Flashbacks show a marriage of gestures rather than words: a hand on a shoulder, a shared cigarette on a balcony, the silent folding of laundry. The ghost, paradoxically, is more present than the living husband ever was. He speaks more. He touches more. He apologizes for his emotional absence.
The film’s radical choice is its refusal to pathologize this phenomenon. Ana’s sister calls a priest. Her mother suggests a psychiatrist. But Răzvan’s camera never judges Ana’s perception. Instead, it lingers on the banal rituals of haunting: the extra plate set at dinner, the paused conversation when a friend enters the room, the way Ana’s hand hovers over the empty side of the bed before deciding not to sleep there. This is the film’s first deep insight: grief,
Netflix excels at what media scholar Marc Steinberg calls “affective efficiency”—content that triggers predictable emotional responses (sadness, fear, catharsis) at predictable intervals. Fantoma Mea Iubita refuses efficiency. It is slow, ambiguous, and unresolved. The final shot offers no closure: Ana looks out her window at a gray Bucharest morning, and Ștefan’s reflection fades—not dramatically, but as if he simply forgot to exist.
The ghost, however, occupies a different register. He appears only in soft, edge-lit scenes: the kitchen at dusk, the bedroom under a single reading lamp, the bathtub where steam blurs the lens. These are the only moments the film allows itself chiaroscuro—the romantic play of light and shadow that mainstream cinema reserves for love scenes. Răzvan is telling us, frame by frame, that the most romantic relationship in this film is between a woman and a dead man. To understand that choice, one must understand the
In an era where grief is medicalized, timed, and expected to conclude within a socially acceptable window, Răzvan’s film is a quiet rebellion. It insists that the dead remain alive in the spaces we refuse to clean out—the second pillow, the saved voicemail, the coffee made for two. And it suggests, with devastating tenderness, that to truly love someone might be to let them haunt you forever.
Fantoma Mea Iubita is streaming on Netflix. Watch it alone. Do not skip the silences.