A MISTAKE - Mark Reviews Movies

A Mistake, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 19, 2024

A young woman arrives at the hospital in intense discomfort and pain, after being sent home from the same hospital only three days prior. A surgeon examines her and determines exploratory surgery is required to figure out what's causing the issue. The title A Mistake should give one an idea of what happens next.

Writer/director Christine Jeffs' movie begins with some strength, as it shows what happens in the operating room in excruciating detail and puts forth a moral conundrum for the surgeon in charge of the operation. She's Elizabeth Taylor (Elizabeth Banks), and no, no one notes the distracting name or the fact that her registrar, basically a resident, is named Richard (Richard Crouchley), although not Burton, thankfully.

Richard is the one who makes the error during the surgery, while trying to insert a device through the patient's abdomen. He can't quite puncture the flesh, so Elizabeth insists that he put a bit more muscle behind the effort. Richard pushes too hard and cuts an artery.

The big question of the story, adapted from a novel by Carl Shuker, is who, if anyone, is responsible for the woman's death. She does die, not on the operating table, but hours later while recovering from surgery in the hospital's intensive care unit. There are two factors in question. The first, obviously, is Richard's act, undertaken by way of Elizabeth's orders and instructions. The second is the reason the woman was ill in the first place. That was an infection, caused by an internal contraceptive device, that led to undiagnosed sepsis.

Elizabeth is convinced that the woman likely would have died, regardless of whatever success the surgery had or errors that were made during the procedure. She's a tough doctor, who has seen a lot and doesn't let things like this affect her, but it doesn't matter how she feels or doesn't feel about what happened in the operating room. All that matters here is that a woman died, a mistake was made, and it's reasonable to believe that error might have resulted in the woman's death.

There are plenty of questions and dilemmas just from this initial setup, as well as in how both Elizabeth and Richard react to the death of their patient. We're left with an unanswerable mystery of sorts (even though the woman's body is in the morgue and could be examined, although, since that might shorten the plot and result in some definitive answers, that's not a concern, apparently), so that points this tale in the direction of one about human behavior amidst uncertainty and under duress.

During the early points of Jeffs' screenplay, that is definitely the case. Elizabeth takes ownership of what happened in the operating room, without admitting responsibility for it or, for that matter, even suggesting that a mistake was made. The central conflict here is between the surgeon and Andrew (Simon McBurney), the hospital's head of surgery, who's moving the facility toward more transparency by planning to publish every surgeon's record for the public to see.

If this hitch and Elizabeth's concerns about her job security weren't on the table, would she react the same way? If Andrew weren't revealed to have it out of Elizabeth specifically and women in the medical field in general, would she be under as much pressure as she is quickly into the story? Isn't that character more intriguing as a bureaucratic paper-pusher with his eye on the bottom line and a fake smile than as a more overt brand of villain?

Those are the questions that seem more pertinent here—not because they expand our understanding of these characters or the ethical issues the premise raises, but because they feel like overly complicated distractions from what's a straightforward but complex predicament. The parents of the young woman eventually file an official complaint against Elizabeth, after she accidentally lets it slip or intentionally makes it known that there was a "complication" during the surgery. From there, she begins a downward spiral professionally and personally—ignoring Richard's guilt and being pushed away by her lover Robin (Mickey Sumner), who was also the head nurse during the surgical procedure.

As played by Banks, the character, a pragmatist for reasons that are either a kind of mental self-defense or to protect her job, is initially fascinating (apart from a New Zealand accent that doesn't sound quite right when the actress bothers with it). Those external complications keep piling up, though, until the morass of hospital procedure, characters trying to defend their own reputations and careers, and an elaborate string of events that result in two more deaths overwhelms this story. As a study of the flexible lines of institutional ethics and individual morality, the movie is burdened by the need to be about much more.

Ironically, that means A Mistake is really about even less on a foundational level. It turns a messy drama of dubious characters, motives, and principles into a simplistic melodrama.

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