It’s Shitty Plot Twist time again!
Yep, we’ve got another film where my usual attempts at weave around story specifics for the sake of spoilers (as I’ve said before, I don’t like the idea of ruining the experience of a film for anyone, even if I personally didn’t care for it) are rendered moot because the narrative not only hinges on a major twist, but so does the film’s efficacy as a whole. This is the kind of shift that had me going from generally liking the film, albeit not all that enthusiastically, to having a confused slack-jawed look plastered on my face for the entire ride home from the cinema. It has been quite a while since a single moment has so utterly demolished the rest of the film around it, but that’s what we’ve got here.
On its face, this is a film set in the Bethlehem, nicknamed ‘The Beth’, a hospital in Northern England that specialises in aged care. We follow the stories of the patients, the doctors and nurses, and in particular, a local TV film crew who are documenting an upcoming celebration for its head nurse (Sister Gilpin, played by Jennifer Saunders) as a part of an effort to help save the hospital from being closed due to NHS budget cuts.
It is a filmed adaptation of a play (written by Alan Bennett, who also did The Lady In The Van) produced by the BBC, and in far too many ways, it shows. There are a lot of storied actors here, from Saunders to Judi Dench to Derek Jacobi to David Bradley, but their performances all feel… off. I couldn’t shake the feeling that their deliveries, and quite a bit of the dialogue, would work a lot better on the stage than on the screen. I don’t know if this is explicitly a problem with handling the script, or if it’s bad direction (this is from the same director as The Children Act, a good theatrical adaptation), but either way, something is amiss. Same goes for the production values, which are quite TV-quality across the board and don’t do a whole lot to elevate this as a collection of characters sharing the frame with each other as they talk. I could’ve sworn that, having seen other filmed versions of theatrical works before, filmmakers usually put in more work than this to make the translation smoother, but maybe that’s just me.
Of course, I am willing to forgive such things because the text (for the most part…) is pretty good. It’s as much a look at old age and how it affects the mind and body as it is a paean to England’s National Health Service, showing the latter as the ones who take care of the former after society largely abandons them with time. Jacobi and Bradley especially get this across well, with Jacobi’s former English teacher using that learning to pontificate on the nature of his ailments and death as the last visitor he’ll ever get, and Bradley just… being curmudgeonly, especially around his son (Russell Tovey), who is part of the advisory board looking to shut the hospital down. Tovey’s Colin ends up being the one who goes through the dramatic arc here, going from cold and fiscally-minded in regards to the hospital’s operation to eventually appreciating what it does and what it represents.
This is all well and good, if a bit emotionally muted… and then the twist comes in.
[SPOILERS]
So, it turns out that Sister Gilpin has been euthanising her patients. For years. Without their consent (mostly, I think?). And if it wasn’t for the chance pairing of Judi Dench and an iPad camera, no one would’ve found out about it.
Now, I could get into the ethical ramifications of euthanasia as it correlates with medical duty of care, or how the script’s use of a euphemistic ‘list’ for incontinent patients feels like a dark joke about the loss of dignity, or I could just point out that this essentially turned into The Good Nurse out of bloody nowhere.
But no, I won’t be getting into any of that. Hell, I won’t even reject this twist out of hand. It reframes the Sister’s actions with a Thatcherite tone, and considering the efforts to have the place shut down over matters of ‘efficiency’, it certainly adds to the larger message.
But it detracts from it just as much, if not more so. In a film that is quite emphatically about the good of the NHS (specifically to do with aged care, lest we start getting into concerns regarding gender affirmative care and the like), featuring such a sharp reveal of a character, who up until said reveal was shown as the sympathetic face of the hospital and why it needs to continue serving the public, as a serial killer… well, it doesn’t exactly give the best impression of medical professionals, does it? And just to make things even more confusing, the film ends proper with a fourth-wall break where a doctor basically lectures the audience about the importance of medical professionals, framed around the initial outbreak of COVID-19. Again, an inclusion I don’t have a real problem with as it stands (even if it definitely works better in the theatre than in the cinema), but in conjunction with the plot twist, it makes the film look positively tone-deaf and incoherent.
Oh, and confusing. Like, this is on the shortlist for the most confounding experiences I’ve had with a film, and not for any positive reasons at that. While there are aspects of this film’s message and overall intent that I find laudable (global pandemic has a way of making one appreciate the efforts of medical workers the world over, or at least, it should), the presentation and execution garble that message so badly as to make it utterly broken and unusable. There are misfires, and then there’s shit like this.
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