Mark Reviews Movies: COLLECTIVE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 19, 2020

The fire was horrible enough. It was at a nightclub in Bucharest, Romania, called Colectiv, where a band was performing on the night of October 30, 2015. Pyrotechnics were out of control, and some flammable material burst into flames. The fire spread. There were no fire exits. In the horrific chaos, 26 people died at the club, and almost 150 people were injured from the inferno, the smoke, or being trampled on by the rush of others trying to survive.

There's a certain expectation established immediately by Collective, director Alexander Nanau's documentary about the aftershock of the Colectiv fire. There would be an investigation, of course, about the many, many failures that resulted in this loss of life. We don't just hear about the fire and the club's negligence, though. We see it.

Footage from the sound operator and from various cellphones inside the club show us exactly how it happened. The fireworks burst. From the stage, a band member notes that something is on fire, and it's not part of the show. Before the thought can register with anyone inside, the flames erupt and spread. People are screaming. People are running. People are falling, and from the perspective on the ground, we see legs and feet, running toward and over and likely on the person lying on the floor.

It's horrifying. We expect this film, which first follows reporters from a local newspaper, will help us understand how and why this tragedy occurred, what culpability assorted people had in these deaths and injuries, and the resulting fight to make sure nothing like this would happen again. It's not about that, though. The situation doesn't get worse, but it does become bad in a completely different way, exposing even more failures that often seem unthinkable.

See, 26 people died at the club, but within a matter of weeks, an additional 38 died in the hospital. That's where Nanau's story really begins. The fire is merely the awful prologue to an examination of a system of widespread corruption within the healthcare system in Romania. Those people in the hospital didn't have to die, but they did—in pain and shame and unnecessary humiliation—because there's money to be made by people who have no business running a child's lemonade stand, let alone an entire hospital or a whole department of government.

Things are so terrible in the Romanian healthcare system, from the bottom (surgeons who bribe their bosses for key positions, in order to take bribes from people seeking treatment) and to the middle (hospital managers who see the budget as an easy source of money for their offshore bank accounts) and right to the top (a government minister who tries to cover up the obvious misdeeds of a pharmaceutical company), that it's killing people. Everyone so turns a blind eye or is so unaware of the extensive corruption that it's a daily sports newspaper that even thinks to scratch the surface. The other papers and TV news outlets just took what the government said at face value.

It feels a bit cheap to liken this documentary, which is about so much unnecessary suffering and how much of that pain is propagated by layers of systems that don't care, to a thriller, but that's the easiest way to describe Nanau's approach and the film's effect. The filmmaker, with startling access, follows a few journalists, primarily the persistent Catalan Tolontan, from the Sports Gazette. They start asking questions, hounding government officials and the heads of Hexi Pharma (which was selling diluted disinfectant to hospitals), answering the calls from various whistleblowers, and promoting the notion that real change needs to be made—an idea that seems so patently obvious but that is fought against at almost every turn.

At one point, there's a mysterious death—a car accident or possible suicide—that's almost too convenient to turn attention away from one corrupt organization and toward the journalists themselves, who are publicly accused of driving a man to suicide for daring to point out how that man profited from disease and death. At another point, the journalists are told they should take whatever steps necessary to protect themselves and their families from unseen but almost certain threats. All of these systems—the government, the hospitals, the big companies, more players that we don't see—are crooked in a very specific way. People quite casually refer to the whole mess as the "mafia state."

We watch it at work, first through the eyes of people like Tolontan, who are unrelenting in their search for the truth and their calls for change, and then from the perspective of Vlad Voiculescu, a patients' rights activist who becomes the government's new Minister of Health. The presence of Voiculescu, a young-looking and straight-talking guy, is a balm after seeing so much dishonesty, so many cover-ups, and such secrecy from his predecessor. The mere fact that the new minister allows Nanau unfettered access to his him, at press conferences and in private meetings with his staff, is a positive sign. Voiculescu even goes out of his way to visit and speak to one of the survivors of the club fire, who lived because she was transported to a hospital outside of Romania (The father of a young man who died in the local hospital is stunned to see how much worse this survivor's condition is compared to his son's).

Whatever relief Voiculescu offers, though, does not last long. The wheels of corruption keep spinning, despite any reforms the new minister suggests or orders. Whistleblowers continue to show the public conditions inside the hospital, with burn patients having their faces covered, because the attending staff doesn't care, or having maggots crawling around in their wounds, because the patients haven't been bathed. Voiculescu watches as the political party in power begins to attack him, because he's getting in the way of their freedom to give and take bribes.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong at Colectiv on that October night in 2015. We think that's as terrible as it can get. Collective proves that assumption wrong. We watch people fight the good fight, and the only solace at the end of this alarming dissection of corruption is the hope that they're still fighting.

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