A MISTAKE
(director/writer: Christine Jeffs; screenwriter: novel by Carl Shuker; cinematographer: John Toon; editor: Paul Maxwell; music: Haim Frank Lifman; cast: Elizabeth Banks (Liz Taylor), Joel Tobeck (Alistair), Simon McBurney (Andrew McGrath), Rena Owen (Tessa), Mickey Sumner (Robin), Richard Crouchley (Richard), Matthew Sunderland (Owen), Acacia O’Connor (Lisa), Fern Sutherland (Jessica), Amelia Reynolds (Vet), Ian Hughes (Dr. Ben Matthews), Emma Draper (Jan); Runtime: 101; MPAA Rating: NR; producers: Christine Jeffs, Matthew Metcalfe; GFC Films; 2024-New Zealand)
“A medical drama about accountability that’s serious, bleak and powerful.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
New Zealander director and writer Christine Jeffs (“Sunshine Cleaning”/”Rain”) adapts to the screen the 2019 medical novel by Carl Shuker. It’s a medical drama about accountability that’s serious, bleak and powerful. It’s set in New Zealand. Elizabeth Banks gives a gripping star performance.
Banks plays the brilliant, top-ranked surgeon in her field, Liz Taylor, in an Aukland hospital, whose one mistake during a routine operation messes up her controlled life. While performing a laparoscopic procedure on a 29-year-old woman, Lisa (Acacia O’Connor), suffering from an advanced septicemia, Liz has her inexperienced student doctor, Richard (Richard Crouchley), insert the last trocar to drain fluid. He screws up the procedure by not getting right the amount of pressure required, thereby rupturing an intestinal artery and that made it necessary to have a more invasive surgical fix.
The operation is graphic, and the squeamish might have to look away.
Dr. Taylor only tells her parents (Rena Owen, Matthew Sunderland) that the operation went well. But the next day Lisa dies in ICU, and the parents want more detailed answers from the surgeon.
Robin (Mickey Sumner), the nurse, colleague and lover is disappointed in Liz for not telling the truth, while the bureaucratic-minded head of surgery, Andrew McGrath (Simon McBurney), is concerned only about lawsuits or scandals or of the soiling of the hospital’s reputation, and orders Liz to say what he tells her–that her death was not caused by the operation. Meanwhile Richard freaks out, while Liz tries to act calm while hiding her stress by saying the operation probably didn’t cause the patient’s death–which, in fact, may be true.
Things become tense when Liz protects Richard and takes full responsibility.
The tense film can be viewed as both a superb character study and one raising questions if full transparency over operations will backfire and the best surgeons will become afraid to operate on the more vulnerable patients because of the possible repercussions over failure.
This is a film too somber to be entertaining, but is worth seeing for its quality.
It played at the Tribeca Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 7/15/2024 GRADE: B+