Margin Call, which opened in Toronto earlier this month, has been hailed by New Yorker magazine as “easily the best Wall Street movie ever made.”

It centres on a night in a Manhattan investment firm in 2008, where a young analyst discovers a fatal flaw in the company’s system — one that threatens to bring down the entire American financial industry.

The film is dramatic in premise and understated in its denouement; we, the audience, are left wondering if this could actually happen, while knowing that something much like it already has.

But how realistic is Margin Call? And what are the lessons that can be gleaned? The Star spoke with three business experts:

Shira Yoskovitch, co-founder of the FACT Network, a learning group for executive women in Canada and principal at Supply Chain (R) Evolution.

Becky Reuber, professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Tom Rand, senior clean tech adviser at Mars Discovery District.

The conversation has been edited for brevity.

What did you think of Margin Call?

Yoskovitch: It was probably as realistic a business movie as I’ve ever seen. It made me recall my initial boardroom experiences that I’ve had both as the analyst walking into the room, as well as one of the people having to make the decision in the room.

Reuber: The storyline I found depressing. I just found that everybody in that movie was very trapped in a reality that was demoralizing for them. I found it realistic in some workplaces but not others.

Rand: I loved the movie actually. I have always looked at the financial crisis as being very much like a precedent for the climate crisis. You have risk building up in the system over time, that nobody acknowledges, and everyone sort of looks the other way. And eventually the chickens will come home to roost.

Was there a moment that really struck you about the movie?

Yoskovitch: (When the analyst character played by Zachary Quinto delivers the news about the firm’s faulty assets to the managers). It accurately showed how little connection there is between the levels of an organization, that they don’t know that there’s a problem in many cases until it’s almost unrecoverable. I appreciated the fact that they didn’t sugar-coat that moment.

Reuber: Penn Badgley (who plays a junior analyst) always asking how much everybody earned on an annual basis. That to me was characteristic of some people who are leaving school with a lot of debt for what they have and they’re really just trying to figure out what this career path looks like.

Rand: (When Jeremy Irons, who plays the firm’s C.E.O., talks about the inevitabilities of the stock market’s fluctuations, as justification for his impending decision to protect his firm). There are moments where people have real moral dilemmas, and then everyone gets bought out. If the price is high enough, you will get bought out.

Is the film plausible?

Yoskovitch: It’s completely plausible. It doesn’t often, thankfully, reach the level of calamity that that movie illustrated, but we’ve seen one trader can bring down a financial network. Nothing exists in a vacuum. The second you remove one thing or you alter one thing, the ripple effects around the market are profound.

Is there a lesson or a moral to the movie?

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Yoskovitch: Make sure understand what’s going on around you, even as you move up, because the decisions at the extreme nature of resolution, only increases as you go up the hierarchy.

Reuber: It’s really important to respect and like where you work. There are lots of financial rewards for lots of types of work, but if it’s ultimately not satisfying for you … then it might be worth looking for some place else to work.

Rand: There (are) more kinds of risks than just financial risks, and that’s what building. The big risk that we’re all aware of and no one’s acknowledging — the elephant in the room — remains carbon, and that’s the risk that’s going to bring the whole thing crashing to the ground, and not just Wall Street.