“Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn” by director Lucy Blakstad

Review by Antony Cirocco, 09-05-2025

Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn - Official movie poster

“Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn” is an investigative feature-length documentary directed by Lucy Blakstad in 2022. It follows the rise and fall of Carlos Ghosn, a businessman in the car industry straddling 2 cultures. The film tracks the rise of Ghosn, a General Manager at French car manufacturer Renault in the late 90’s as he takes control of Nissan in Japan and begins to take a firm grip over both companies. But when his business practices came into question, he was jailed in Japan while the scrutiny of his business practices raged in his absence. Whilst on parole, he and his associates plot to get him out of Japan, and intrigue ensues.

This film is an interesting deep dive into one of the more intriguing cases in modern times of a business leader who, once the golden child, had a phenomenal fall from grace. While online pundits applaud and worship and applaud Elon Musk and other car industry leaders as untouchable bastions of commercial enterprise, this film paints a more realistic picture of the life of a corporate leader who flew a little too close to the sun.

Ghosn’s rise is public knowledge from obscurity is followed quickly by his rise to CEO of Michelin in North America. He moved to Renault in the 90’s and quickly climbed the corporate ladder he brutally restructured the company to prove his worth and raise profits. The Director follows these events throughout the documentary with dry talking head interviews and archival footage. We then use a further combination of talking head interviews and an interesting but odd reenactment featuring a character claiming to be his personal secretary, reflecting on the changes in his role and his business acumen. His rise to the CEO role of both Renault and CEO where he smashed the workforce of Japan Nissan with another round of redundancy, none of the affected workers were interviewed. There was a staged interview with his live-in maid where she reflected on Ghosn’s home life and personal attitudes, but this lacked depth. During all of this, the production levels are good and the story does remain interesting, like a corporate road movie where you know the lead character is about to drive off a cliff…so to speak. This film, however, creatively doesn’t break any new ground and at times it’s a little stylistically confused, but it works, it’s engaging.

The Director Blakstad does a great job here with a difficult and international production with elements of intrigue to the story spanning South America, France, Japan and Lebanon. At times, however, the shifts between modes of production seem sparse and inconsistent but overall the film is ambitious. The camera work is consistent even if the format choices chop and change but that's the nature of documentary, I guess. The film lacks pace and the most intriguing scenes happen at the end of the film and I wish we could have arrived there sooner. The music is stylised but not offensively so and the production design is great in the reenactments, combined with archival CCTV footage, those reenacted scenes were quite convincing.

Ethically, this film is quite sound but it’s hard to tell at times due to a lack of depth of Journalistic Rigour. For example, claims are made about the conditions Ghosn faces in the Japanese jail but these are never really proven. Toward the end of the film the Ghosn’s sister brags about planning to remove Ghosn from the clutches of the Japanese authorities, a crime that is never questioned. There are also claims discussed about properties bought with Renault and Nissan money, but there is no detail around which residences, how much they cost or how they were paid for? It’s information that should be available to an investigative journalist brought in as a consultant. More detail there would have given the film more gravity.

This film had the opportunity to act as a warning to business leaders who go rogue, who punish workers for profit, who spend recklessly, and who flirt with the rule of the law for their own gain…but sadly, it doesn’t. It paints the events of Ghosn’s departure from Japan as a spectacle, which it was, but the viewer leaves the film not really knowing more than what they already knew. There is no ‘big message’ or ‘call to action’, it’s just a good story well told without any bells and whistles, without over-the-top animation sequences or special effects. There is no alignment with the then rise of online business Barons like Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg, no ‘take heed’ lofty business types, your fiscal wings might be clipped if you don’t behave…"look what happened to Ghosn". Possibly this is because the family of Ghosn were involved in the production of the film or there was some kind of alliance there to smooth things over and not make Ghosn out to be the aspirational, reckless business leader he was.

Research, more so, the depth of research leaves this film being good, but not great and some of the inconsistency around the visual style of the film could be brought down to budget and shooting interviews in different countries. Overall, though this film is an effective and engaging story.

I lived in Japan around the time of the events in this film, and for me there was some nostalgia, recalling being in Tokyo when these events unfolded. The film brings these events together and effectively gives me a summarised telling of what happened and when, and to its credit, the film does this well. There could have been a more in-depth investigation into certain events, and maybe in a docu series, there would be time to do that, but there wasn’t here.

So with my personal connection to Japan and interest in everything French, I found this film enjoyable and interesting but not as great as it could have been. I am giving this film 3.5/5 stars.

Review by Antony Cirocco

Check out the trailer