„Sometimes the cat does win, but the mouse is way too smart”, a kid says to Bogdan (Laurențiu Bănescu), an ambulance worker doing night shifts, and getaway driver in his spare time. For the better part of Boss, the second feature of Bogdan Mirică (Dogs, Shadows), it’s not very clear who the mouse and the cat is, an uncertainty onto which the lion’s share of the suspense of this heist movie sans heists and car chases is hinged upon.

According to the well-worn tradition of this type of film, the protagonist is still nameless by the time that we find out about him, after a hit, he ran over a woman with his car, and she can recognize him. The sensation that something is not quite right turns into worry and fear when he starts putting two and two together and realizes that the fourth member of his gang has already started to cover his tracks. The more his fellows start to disappear in shady circumstances, the tighter the noose around the protagonist gets.

The ambulance driver is a laconic guy, keeping to himself, somewhat antisocial (“Hey, do you ever speak to anyone when you show up for work?”, his manager reproaches him at one point), whom Mirica and DOP Andrei Butică shoot as if he were de Niro in Heat, string out through his window in the night to see whether someone is following him. In the unusually long tradition of films about getaway drivers, the film lands closer to Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) than to Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017). He also has a girlfriend that is an actress named Carla (Ioana Bugarin), who seems to have landed from an altogether different movie, with her Mia Wallace-like haircut, with whom she shares a series of gestures (they both “powder” their noses before going out to dance) and has a certain inclination towards theatricality. 

Beyond the futility of the exercise (a partially failed opportunity, because the director is working with a promising premise and with the means that would inject some adrenaline into the Romanian cinematic landscape, which suffers from an acute lack of genre films), all we have is a character study, and in this sense, Mirică, a scriptwriter always concert to question the darker sides of masculinity, is much more successful. Bănescu is given a role that is close to the one performed by Bogdan Farcaș in Unidentified, always one step ahead of the spectators with his plans and deductions, because he knows a lot more than they do. The risk of him blowing his top off at any time and of following his calling towards violence is, at first, a subtle suggestion, then it arrives in a split-screen scene that follows the conclusion of two separate choices in parallel. The tension arises from the very fragile balance between the moments in which the protagonist has a semblance of control and those where he is completely overcome by the situation, and it’s well spaced out, enhanced by Marius Lefterache’s thriller soundtrack.

When the mouse finally runs into the cat (or is it the other way around?), the showdown between the ambulance driver and the “fourth man” (Mimi Brănescu) moved into Bogdan’s head, who weighs his options in a dialogue that lies somewhere between Guy Ritchie and Corneliu Porumboiu. The sequence – a classical moment in which the spectator is finally allowed to catch up with the protagonist’s conclusions – is the most entertaining one in a film that generally runs away from frivolous pleasures. Too little, and too late for a film that could have embraced its influences to the fullest.

Boss will be released in Romanian cinemas on the 21st of April.

Dragoș Marin

Dragoș Marin published articles and film reviews on filmreporter.ro and colaborated in various specialized festivals and TV shows. In everyday life he's a prokect manager while continuing to stay connected to pop culture and to write about what he has to say.