Roshan Sethi has a résumé that could make the most accomplished among us feel like underachievers. His three previous features include the thoroughly charming 2024 rom-com A Nice Indian Boy. Two months ago his novel, The Simp, a funny Hollywood satire, was published. He was the co-creator of the Fox series The Resident. And as if that’s not enough, for a couple of months a year he still works as a radiation oncologist at a Boston hospital.
He puts all those experiences to good use in The Surgeon, a genre-bending swirl that is part The Pitt (but gorier), part tense crime thriller, part action movie and part midnight movie, all infused with witty touches. It is wildly entertaining.
The Surgeon
The Bottom Line
Ready for cult-classic status.
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Centrepiece)
Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Martin Freeman, Laurie Davidson, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Joseph Mydell
Director and writer: Roshan Sethi
1 hour 32 minutes
As clever as Sethi’s screenplay is, the film’s greatest asset is Michelle Yeoh as Eliza Lim, a recently retired surgeon who is kidnapped by criminals and forced at gunpoint to operate on one of their colleagues. No one else could have brought the same serene presence, quiet intelligence and flair for action, a combination that is ideally suited to the character. Sethi’s film is perfectly in sync with Yeoh’s strengths.
The film swiftly establishes Dr. Lim’s character in a few brief scenes that chart her single-minded dedication to her job and the boring, empty retirement she has reluctantly entered. The Surgeon isn’t a character study, but we instantly know who that character is.
Out of nowhere, it seems — but actually for reasons revealed much later — she is abducted and finds herself in an abandoned hospital, surrounded by men with guns. An operating room is ready for her, and the patient’s face is covered. The operating scenes are not for the squeamish, but it’s worth covering your eyes to get to the real action. Lim realizes the kidnappers have no reason to keep her alive after the surgery, so she has to outwit them using her mind, medical knowledge and a few hidden scalpels.
Sethi often holds the camera on Yeoh’s face, expressive even at its most passive. Lim speaks softly as she proves the thugs are no match for her. “You can stop pointing that gun at me,” she tells one of her minders after the surgery. “I’m an old woman, half your age, half your weight. There’s nothing I can do to you.” Part of the fun of watching is that we can guess that line is a ruse, but we don’t know what she’s planning.
Yeoh, of course, started out in martial arts films, but that is not the kind of action displayed here. Lim knows just where on the body to attack her kidnappers and goes for their most vulnerable spots with swift jabs and great precision. As in the best action films, we never lose sight of how the hero’s personality drives it. “You’ll never shoot a gun again,” she calmly tells one of her captors after severing some cartilage in his wrists. “That’s not snot, that’s your brain fluid dripping out,” she says to another after ramming an instrument up his nose. One of the weirdest, wittiest touches is that whenever she attacks, we see the body beneath the skin, viewing the bones she’s breaking or tendons she’s cutting as if a medical textbook had come to life.
Sethi loads the film with noir tropes, including a ticking clock that counts down how much time the patient has to live after Lim threatens to kill him. What has she got to lose? But even at its most noirish, visually the film is filled with light and color. A major action scene takes place in the former hospital’s chapel, full of bright stained glass. And she lives in a spacious, light-filled house with a large garden, which we see before and after the kidnapping. The Surgeon is taut and suspenseful, but never claustrophobic. The editing smoothly keeps the momentum going and the genre touches blend easily.
Martin Freeman enters the film fairly late in a supporting role as the crime boss who masterminded the scheme. As always, he is expert at looking meek while sounding deadly. And Joseph Mydell adds a welcome, sweet touch as a man who brings warmth and emotion to Lim’s life.
With a nod to genre conventions, the final shot leaves room for a sequel. But wherever Sethi’s varied career takes him, he has already established himself as one of the most exciting filmmakers around.
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