Based on the novel "Balanta" by Ion Baiesu, This film, a French-Romanian co-production, is Pintilie's reaction to the 1989 collapse of the Communist regime in his country and his expectations for the future. It begins as a nightmare and ends with a vague expectation of the break of day.

The time is apparently prior to the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. Among other things, "The Oak" is about the spiritual journey of Nela, a young schoolteacher, after the death of her father, a former big shot in the secret police.

The two are living in epic squalor in a tiny flat in a Bucharest housing project. The place is a mess of unwashed dishes, soiled sheets and small mountains of cigarette butts. Nela and her father lie in bed, a 16-millimeter movie projector between them, watching home movies of a happier time: a small girl at her birthday party, running around and aiming a toy gun at guests, who dutifully topple over for her amusement.

Nela at first seems completely opaque. She reacts to her father's death as if he had been a lover. She's so possessive that she won't let her sister into the flat. When she tries to donate her father's organs, she's told by a doctor that it's too late, that they've already deteriorated. Nela has the body cremated and for the rest of the movie carries the ashes with her in a Nescafe jar.

In the course of "The Oak," Nela accepts a job outside Bucharest, is gang-raped en route to the assignment, learns that her father was something less than a hero and meets a man who is, in his way, just as off the wall as she is. He is Mitica, a cheerfully sardonic doctor whose relations with the regime are not good. He refuses to follow protocol and insists on taking care of a patient whom the regime would like to see die.

Though Nela's is a spiritual journey, Pintilie dramatizes it in the bitter ways of social satire.  It is wildly grotesque, shocking and sometimes very funny. The details are vivid. The authorities are alternately fearful, blundering and good-hearted. At one point Nela and Mitica go camping, only to wake up in the night to find themselves in the middle of a target range. Late in the film, as Nela and Mitica reach some kind of understanding, Pintilie seems to suggest that there is still hope for Romania, though it's not just around the corne.