After the Axe
1981 · 56m · Canada
Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Fired executive Biff Wilson navigates a growing industry built around terminating managers. Business collaborators help dramatize the human cost of corporate dismissal.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1981 satire about firing people that treats corporate horror with actual gravity—subversive precisely because it refuses the easy snark, and that restraint makes it weirder than any genre-flip could manage.
Gunnarsson's formal approach to the subject positions this within a lineage of socially conscious documentary-drama hybrids; the decision to have business collaborators *dramatize* the dismissals creates a meta-textual rigor that rewards close attention to its construction.
The pivot to having industry insiders stage reconstructions of terminations is the masterstroke that transforms what could be a standard corporate critique into something about performance, complicity, and witness—a single structural choice that reframes everything.