If it hadn’t happened, it wouldn’t exist - Dismissed

Ioana Satmari • 3/17/2025

(Pretend)making with a strong trigger, the beginning frustrated me terribly: the bureaucracy, the confidentiality clauses, the pretense, and the tossed from a supervisor to a colleague, to an external contractor, and so on. Dismissed, directed by Horia Cucută and George Ve Ganaeaard, as its title suggests, is about quickly closing the file on a death and burying the story. This marks the starting point of journalist Gabriel Vânătorul (The Hunter), played by Daniel Popa.

It begins sharply. Intrusive and aggressive, the journalist speaks directly to you with a superior tone. You almost feel like you’re being held accountable, and you don’t belong there. He comes on strong, and you instinctively take a step back. There’s so much coming at you that it feels like he’s trying to manipulate you, not even giving you the space to form your own opinion about what he just told you. He insists, at all costs, on convincing you that what he says is crucial and, indeed, gravely serious, drawing conclusions on your behalf (“Look, the manager doesn’t want to talk to us” – after calling him and getting no response).

Then the office wanderings begin, but not before a cliché emotional pit stop with the grief-stricken parents (Neculai Predica as the father and Grațiela Popa as the mother). Their pain feels somewhat unconvincing. The parents’ lamenting remarks and comparisons begin to flow: “He couldn’t find his place,” “Poor thing,” “He was God-fearing.” What can they do, two broken, unfortunate old people who feel like bigger victims than their son, yet are deeply grateful to the journalist, who was “the first to take the trouble to come here and ask about our boy.” The injustices and struggles are presented in a flood that overwhelms your mind. Then, we move on to the bitter ladies protecting the company’s policies, saying nothing new. The blame lies solely with the negligent employee who wasn’t supposed to be there. But if he wasn’t supposed to be there, how did he end up there?

It’s only after we move past the parents and finally begin piecing together the told and untold details that the story takes shape. We talk to colleagues, former classmates, bosses, specialists, the therapist, the fiancée, and a few more characters who build the profile of Eremia, the deceased employee. He was a reserved person who came to the city and found it hard to adapt (that’s about all his parents knew). Yet this “hard time” might have been more burdened by the weight his parents projected onto his move, as they didn’t seem particularly close to him. He worked for a company developing AI designed to remove inappropriate content from the internet. Until the AI could operate independently, multiple employees had to train it by analyzing and cataloging videos.

Jumping to the crux of the investigation: Eremia was in the server room, where he wasn’t supposed to have access, and somehow, it’s unclear how, one of the servers caught fire. On top of that, there was a short circuit, and due to a chain of events, the sprinklers activated with a delay. These three factors led to Eremia’s death, a man who had never caused anyone any trouble.

The story unfolds, sometimes twisted, not always chronologically: Eremia wasn’t as withdrawn as he seemed, and the company wasn’t entirely clean. The events aren’t wholly fictitious. Such cover-ups exist. Protective policies for employees performing content checks are increasingly less visible. Often, it’s unclear under what conditions these workers operate, how much they work, and whether they’re properly paid. Many are in countries with cheap labor, exploited due to underdeveloped social policies.

The two sides of the narrative: the stiff and guarded big shots versus the filler-like acquaintances, all orchestrated by the journalist, end up… better off than the journalist himself. Perhaps more at peace and calm. For most of them, the ordeal seems to pass quickly and might have faded even faster if Gabriel, the journalist, hadn’t nagged them so much about ethics, values, and responsibility.

That’s life… He died? He died. Let’s move on. The future doesn’t build itself