SPOILER ALERT: the following article contains massive spoilers, including the ending. If you have not yet seen the movie, proceed at your own risk, or better, come back to this article later!
Directed by Alexander Nanau (TOTO AND HIS SISTERS), Collective follows a heroic team of journalists as they uncover shocking, widespread corruption. After a deadly nightclub fire, the mysterious death of the owner of a powerful pharmaceutical firm, and the quiet resignation of a health minister – seemingly unrelated events, all within weeks of each other – the team of intrepid reporters exposes a much larger, much more explosive political scandal.
Collective is a fast-paced, real-time detective story about truth, accountability, and the value of an independent press in partisan times.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Collective Plot Summary and Synopsis
In Bucharest, Romania, a fire breaks out in October 2015 and engulfs a club called Colectiv, immediately killing 27 people and injuring 180. Due to the outrage over the lack of fire exits and proper health and safety inspections, people took to the streets to protest the corruption and lack of accountability.
Over the following few months, 37 more victims died, partially due to the lack of proper healthcare and negligible medical care at the public hospitals. These events led to even greater outrage, and ensuing mass protests resulted in the Social Democratic Party, the ruling party at the time, to resign from government.
Due to the numerous deaths of victims whilst in hospital care, journalists began investigating the mismanagement of healthcare by public hospitals. Sources from various public hospitals informed them that many patients died due to bacterial infections and that their hospitals were never safe for burn victims.
The journalists began investigating the disinfectants used at public hospitals, suspecting they were diluted, as claimed by one of their sources. However, the documents provided by hospitals claimed otherwise, so the journalists decided to take and test samples of the disinfectants used.
The testing confirmed that the disinfectants supplied to public hospitals were diluted to 10% of what they are supposed to have been. The journalists subsequently publish a hard-hitting story about the supplier, Hexi Pharma, and how it falsified the documentation for the supplied disinfectants. Furthermore, the story showed how the government blatantly failed to take any steps to properly verify the supplier and its products, and failed to properly protect medical patients from this gross injustice.
In fact, the government lied about its role. The Minister of Health, Patriciu Achimaș-Cadariu, ordered investigations into the situation, since Hexi Pharma supplied over 200 hospitals at the time.
When Cătălin Tolontan, a journalist from the Gazette, goes on TV to discuss the investigation, the Minister of Health was dismissive of the journalist’s insistence for facts and evidence. Moreover, the Minister stated that their own governmental testing showed that the disinfectant solutions were 95 percent effective.
The journalists push further and find a source that has been giving the intelligence service briefings since 2008, telling the service for years that the bacterial infections were killing people and what the cause was. The service knew about the problem and did nothing. The Gazette publishes the story. Mass protests continue over the corruption and lack of proper healthcare protection.
Consequently, the Minister of Health resigns and leaves the press briefing without taking any questions. Furthermore, a criminal investigation begins against the CEO of Hexi Pharma, Dan Condrea.
The government announces at a press conference that they have tested the Hexi products and that they found the solutions were all diluted. Tolontan asks about the 95 percent effectiveness previously claimed by the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry responds by refusing to comment on their previous claim. Shortly after, Condrea is killed in a car crash. No one is sure if it is an accident, murder, or suicide.
The papers suspect he was killed, because he could have named all the officials within the government and public healthcare that he bribed.
Later, The Gazette finds a patient in a hospital with maggots festering in their wound. Their source, a frustrated doctor, explains patients deaths resulting from diluted disinfectants or inadequate blood transfusion services, increases unabated, even after the recent Social Democratic governmental ousting in late 2015.
Vlad Voiculescu, the new technocratic Minister of Health, does not want to shut down the hospital. Therefore, he contacts the hospital to enquire about the patient, but is informed that the patient died the night earlier. The doctor meets with Vlad and details how the hospital management avoided the problems and did nothing while patients were dying. She also discusses how the hospitals treat patients inhumanely, as well as how the bribes are arranged between hospital managers and doctors.
There isn’t a single unit throughout the public hospitals that isn’t affected by profound administrative corruption.
Vlad learns he cannot fire those corrupt hospital managers currently in place, so he demands extremely strict regulations for any new hospital managers. He meets with his team about trying to break down the corrupt hospital system and the horrific management, many of whom bribed their way into their positions.
Eventually, Vlad begins to realize that the whole system is rotten, and so imbedded, eradicating corruption would entail ‘firing everyone’.
Collective Ending
Election day arrives and the Social Democrats sweep the election, obtaining the most votes. Later on, the public hospital appoints a manager who is unqualified and legally unable to manage a hospital.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).