His new film The Surgeon, starring Michelle Yeoh as a kidnapped doctor forced to operate at gunpoint, has The Hollywood Reporter calling it wildly entertaining.
Roshan Sethi has a day job most filmmakers would find baffling. For a couple of months every year, he still works as a radiation oncologist at a Boston hospital. The rest of the time he directs films, co-created the Fox medical drama The Resident, and just had a novel published. His latest, The Surgeon, is the kind of movie that could only come from someone living inside both worlds.
Michelle Yeoh plays Eliza Lim, a recently retired surgeon dragged out of a quiet, faintly boring retirement when she's abducted by criminals. The demand is simple and horrifying. Operate on one of their own, at gunpoint, in an abandoned hospital with an operating room already set up and the patient's face covered. Once the surgery's done, there's no obvious reason to keep her alive. So Lim has to think her way out, using nothing but her medical training and a few scalpels she manages to hide.
The Hollywood Reporter's review, published Sunday, describes the film as part medical drama, part crime thriller, part action movie, part midnight horror, and says it's Yeoh's calm, cerebral screen presence that pulls all four together. She doesn't fight like she did in her martial arts days. Lim goes for pressure points and pain, not spectacle, and the film reportedly cuts to X-ray style visuals of bones and tendons whenever she strikes, so you see exactly what damage she's doing.
There's dark humour laced through it too. "You can stop pointing that gun at me," Lim tells one of her captors, playing weak right before she isn't. Later, after ramming an instrument up another man's nose, she informs him flatly that what's dripping out is brain fluid, not snot. The review calls these the film's weirdest, wittiest touches.
Martin Freeman shows up late as the crime boss behind the whole scheme, doing his usual trick of sounding menacing while looking mild. Joseph Mydell gets a smaller, warmer role as someone in Lim's post-retirement life. And despite a plot built on captivity and dread, the review notes the film is shot bright and colourful throughout, from a stained-glass chapel where a key action scene unfolds to Lim's own sunlit house with its garden.
Sethi's screenplay leans hard into noir mechanics, including a countdown clock ticking down how long the kidnapped patient has left to live once Lim starts making threats of her own. But nothing about the film reads as grim or airless, according to the review, which credits tight editing for keeping the momentum up even as the genres keep shifting under it.
The review ends on a pointed note. The final shot, it says, leaves the door open for a sequel. No studio has confirmed anything of the sort, and there's no theatrical release date attached to The Surgeon yet. Whether Sethi gets to follow Dr. Lim into a second outing may depend on how loudly this review is echoed once the film actually reaches audiences.
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