Michelle Yeoh vehicle ‘The Surgeon’ is a bloody good time

A vicious little genre oddity from TIFF’s Centerpiece section, The Surgeon stars Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh as a recently retired sawbones pulled back into her profession in the most unexpected way. A film of crime conspiracies and plenty of sinew, it’s written and directed by Indo Canadian filmmaker Roshan Sethi, whose rom coms like A Nice Indian Boy are a far cry from what he puts forward here. Sethi is also an oncologist who practices medicine part time, and upon watching The Surgeon, it’s clearly the kind of gleeful thriller only a doctor could’ve made, even if it stops short of truly visceral mayhem.

What exactly does that look like? For one thing, it’s rooted entirely in the character of Dr. Eliza Lin (Yeoh), who we first meet as a med school matriculant (played by Sabrina Pui Yee Chin), as she’s told how difficult and isolating her path is going to be. She throws herself headfirst into her education, but before she knows it, she’s 60, recently retired, living alone, and trying to make friends at a local book club. However, her humdrum routine is interrupted when she’s kidnapped by a pair of hoodlums and wakes up in an abandoned hospital at gunpoint, before being forced to perform abdominal surgery on an anonymous, tattooed patient.

Between the stolen medical equipment and a similarly abducted anesthesiologist, Eliza has everything she needs, but is carefully observed both in the operating theater and from the windows above. She’s told that if she successfully completes the surgery, she’ll walk away unharmed, but understandably, she has a hard time believing this bargain. So, bit by bit, she begins fighting back using nothing more than her wit, her surgical skills, and a handful of instruments, all while keeping her patient alive—as is her duty.

Rather than framing Eliza as some secret badass, Sethi constantly has her on the backfoot, and she loses more often than she wins while trying to escape the hospital’s winding confines, in some nerve-wracking chase scenes punctuated by minor carnage. Flashbacks slowly detail both her self-imposed isolation as well as how this criminal predicament came to be, but the movie’s most exciting moments are when it erupts through brief, medically tinged savagery that Eliza explains to each of her captors—for instance, exactly what tendons she’s cutting in self-defense, and the long-term effects therein.

From left, Martin Freeman, Michelle Yeoh, and director Roshan Sethi.

Photagonist.ca

These delights are immediately and overtly cinematic, recalling, on one hand, the “discombobulate” fight from the 2009 Sherlock Holmes, wherein Robert Downey Jr. details the medical and tactical specifics of each careful strike. However, Sethi goes a step further with his visualizations, veering into anatomically detailed x-rays as Eliza might picture each stab or slice, yielding something akin to the brutal fatalities in Mortal Kombat X.

These initial bits of bloody violence are wonderfully rousing, though The Surgeon peaks early in this regard, albeit for a distinct purpose. Its structure is surprising, allowing for a deeper focus on Eliza’s character as a woman who can’t accept the inevitability that her human form will fail her, thus forcing her to retire. The fragility of the body is front and center throughout the film, in a multitude of ways, especially when its key villain (a mobster played by Martin Sheen) begins fighting a similar battle against his own mortality—the reason he nabbed Eliza in the first place.

With its surprisingly quiet final act, The Surgeon embodies a last-ditch defiance against aging, and against the confining lifestyle of the medical path—albeit in the form of raucous action that might make you wince at certain instruments upon your next O.R. visit. While it doesn’t quite build to major explosions worthy of all-out applause (or pay off its most kooky setup, involving a prolapsed anus), its ebbs and flows are more emotionally grounded than your average midnight offering. This makes it a unique moviegoing experience that taps into Yeoh’s prowess as an elder stateswoman actress looking back on her career, and proving without a doubt that she has plenty left in the tank.