ROUNDING - Mark Reviews Movies

Rounding, Doppelgänger Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 13, 2025

A hospital is a fine backdrop for drama, as many movies and maybe even more television shows have shown us over the decades, and the ordinary routine of a doctor on duty in such a facility is rife with the potential for the same. Rounding follows a doctor, currently serving as a resident at a small-town hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown at one in the big city, as he tries to get his life and career in order. Director Alex Thompson and co-writer Christopher Thompson's screenplay, though, is also a mystery about an ailing patient and, at times, a horror tale about the doctor's traumas manifesting themselves.

It's a lot, in other words, for a movie with a fairly simple premise. Thompson's movie is genuinely compelling when it sticks to and dramatizes the constant strain on a doctor's body and mind. Everything else either gets in the way or feels like an idea in need of more attention than the filmmakers are willing or able to give it.

The doctor at the center of it all is James (Namir Smallwood, who gives a subtle performance of encroaching stress). His whole career is in front of him, but after treating a patient who dies from a heart attack under his care, James collapses in the hall, undergoes some counseling, and decides to leave the city for town near the countryside.

That opening scene, by the way, is a bit confusing in the way Thompson stages it and treats it as a bit of a mystery later. We have a pretty strong impression of James' motives and actions at a crucial moment, but the incident is never raised directly until the very last scene of the movie, as if the whole event is somehow overlooked by everyone else or meant to be a surprise when the full truth of it is finally revealed. It's a bit difficult to really understand James when the movie refuses to address the obvious or what would, in theory, be a key component of what's driving the character's dedication, even in the face of a lot of scrutiny about it.

The real core of the narrative is how James' life, after he comes under the tutelage and oversight of Dr. Emil Harrison (Michael Potts) at that small-town hospital, is entirely consumed by his work. The cinematography (by Nate Hurtsellers) and especially the editing (by Michael S. Smith) give a constant sense of disorientation. The camera often stays close to James' weary face, as he makes his rounds and continues his studies in the rental house where he lives and spends all day contemplating a case that strikes him as odd. Time is elusive here, too, as the character shuts his eyes in one location only to awaken in a different one—often losing track of hours or days.

It all keeps going, though, with no real rest for James, whose bedside manner comes into question after roughly giving one patient a terminal cancer diagnosis, who desperately wants to prove himself and that he's better than some might suspect if they knew about his previous residency, and who becomes obsessed with one particular patient. She's Helen (Sidney Flanigan), a young woman about his age, who has had asthma her entire life. In the past year or so, she has been in and out of the hospital with severe respiratory issues. The other doctors on duty assume it's caused by the asthma, but James notices that Helen's test results don't line up with that analysis. He suspects something else is happening to her but faces pushback from the rest of the staff and Helen's mother (played by Rebecca Spence).

At its core, then, the story here is sound and promising. There's the rest of the fraternal screenwriters' aims, though, which include James attending an acting class in order to communicate with patients better and the stray horror elements of this tale. Considering just those two ideas, it should be apparent how jarring the movie can be. On the one hand, we have an intriguing little detail about a doctor's professional development, which is aligned with the grounded approach to most of this story.

On the other, James has nightmares of that patient from the opening scene, imagines things lurking in the shadows of the hospital, and even has visions of multi-headed beast, with flames atop its many heads like a twisted candelabra, stalking him. Those parts clash so blatantly with everything surrounding them that it's tough to determine the filmmakers' thinking behind them. The movie's tone and tactics are otherwise down-to-earth, even as the mystery of Helen's condition gradually overshadows the character study and visceral examination of the day-to-day grind of practicing medicine.

Admittedly, the horror sections don't take up much of the story here, but they are a noticeable reflection of how much Rounding attempts to do and how shattered the focus of the movie becomes. Simpler isn't always better, but in this case, the added complications definitely deflect from and confound what this story is trying to do.

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