Description from Netflix:
Medical student Mary Mason is becoming dissatisfied with her
path in life, mostly because she’s piling up massive debt. But when she’s offered a lucrative
opportunity to get involved in extreme body-modification surgeries, she jumps
at the chance.
My thoughts:
Sure. The massive
debt factored into her dissatisfaction.
She was in school to become a surgeon, after all, and that isn’t cheap.
You know what her main driving decision was, though? My money would be on getting drugged and
raped by one of her professors. She had
delved into the world of body modification before that point, but it was more
of a one-off surgery to get some money.
After being raped, she dropped out of school and started doing body-modification
on a more full-time basis.
First, the good. I
loved Katharine Isabelle as Mary Mason.
She had a complex character to play, and she nailed every scene. I can’t imagine a better actress for this
role.
Whether through the style or my sheer confusion, I found
myself interested the entire time. The
running time is 103 minutes, but I never once felt bored, or found myself
staring at my watch, imploring it to move along. Considering it’s a slow-moving movie, that’s
a pretty impressive feat.
To me, this film kind of had the same feel as Excision. But that’s probably because they both involve
surgery, and I’m not very imaginative when it comes to comparing movies.
Anyone who knows me know that I enjoy a good revenge
movie. I assume it comes from my love of
Westerns. (Also, Payback is one of my all-time favorite movies.) So, when this film took a turn towards the
revenge side of things, I was completely on board. It was a different kind of revenge than I was
used to. After all, she was a surgeon. Things were bound to get really weird.
And they did.
But only a little bit.
And that was only a minor part of the story.
And that was really my main problem with this film. It didn’t seem like it knew what it wanted to
be. It was all over the map. It was a revenge movie. It was a female empowerment movie. It was a cautionary tale to those heading
down the wrong path. It was a kind of
love story.
It was all those things and more. Sometimes it worked. Other times, it felt directionless. A bunch of ideas all crammed into one movie,
without necessarily being connected all the time. It felt disjointed and strained. It definitely could’ve been tightened up a
bit.
I can apply that same criticism to the characters in
general. Many of them seemed to change
depending on the scene. More
specifically, Mary’s character changed multiple times throughout the film,
often with little-to-no reason. Scene-to-scene,
I never knew what I was going to get.
Would it be the confident surgeon?
The revenge-seeker with ice water in her veins? The timid student? The hardened businesswoman? As I mentioned earlier, Katharine Isabelle
was great as all those things, but the swing between all of them was jarring at
times.
I feel like they were trying to make a very important movie
with a very important message, yet I didn’t quite understand because of the
disjointed nature of it all. However,
it’s also quite possible that I didn’t get it because I’m not an overly
intelligent person. That option is
certainly still on the table.
As it was, I still liked it.
But I feel like I easily could’ve loved this film.
This is only the second full-length film from the Twisted
Twins (Jen & Sylvia Soska). While
far from perfect, it showed a ton of promise.
I can’t wait to see what they do next.
Rating: 3/5
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