Review | Collective movie review: Oscar-nominated Romanian documentary a riveting journalistic thriller
- Nominated for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, Collective is shocking at times but absolutely essential viewing
- It paints a desperate and tragic portrait of a people held hostage by their own government, persistently lied to, defrauded and discarded
5/5 stars
On 30 October 2015, a fire in the Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest, Romania killed 27 revellers and injured 180 others. In the months that followed, a further 37 victims succumbed to their injuries, many due to secondary bacterial infections contracted while in hospital.
Alexander Nanau’s unflinching documentary Collective follows the journalists of the Sports Gazette newspaper as they investigate how this could have happened and who is responsible. Nominated for both Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards, Collective is a riveting journalistic thriller.
Catalin Tolontan and his colleagues at the Gazette risk their lives to expose widespread corruption, fraud and negligence that is ravaging Romania’s state-run health care system. Their discoveries unfold with a breathless intensity to rival classics of the genre like Spotlight or All the President’s Men, as every new twist reveals more about the true scale of the problem.
Its jaw-dropping revelations implicate everyone from disinfectant manufacturers to hospital management and the Romanian state government itself, which perpetually places its members’ own financial gain and professional advancement ahead of the lives of the Romanian people.