Monday new releases: 14 October 2024

A Mistake, The Apprentice, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, Hellboy: The Crooked Man are in cinemas, The Last of the Sea Women (Apple TV+) and Killer Heat (Prime Video) are streaming.

A big week for new releases and I couldn’t get to a few of them. Sorry but I ran out of time for Rosalie (returning to cinemas from the French Film Festival) and Hold Your Breath (Disney+) and House of Spoils (Prime Video) were nixed by the editor-in-chief as she didn’t fancy horror on a Saturday night. October being what it is these days, we may not be watching many films together.

A Mistake is that rare thing these days – a mature, thoughtful, serious local drama built on the good bones of a well-regarded novel. Carl Shuker published the book in 2019 and it was inspired by what he was seeing in his day job in the New Zealand health bureaucracy. The introduction of surgical ‘league tables’ – publicly available records of patient mortality tied to surgeons and facilities – bothered him as they reduced complex situations to simple binaries and loaded unnecessary additional stress onto an already highly pressurised profession.

To their credit, Shuker’s book (and Christine Jeffs’ screen adaptation) don’t attempt to widen out the perspective, or assign broader causes of medical mishap. In our current political environment, it might have been tempting to argue that tightly constrained funding and deteriorating facilities are contributory factors to misadventure, even though that’s probably true.

But Shuker and Jeffs are interested in how normal human fallibility is treated by everyone it affects. There’s the corporate blame game, patients and families who demand to be treated as customers (with the often unreasonable expectations that brings), colleagues who prefer avoidance to collegiality. There’s precious little in the way of forgiveness to go around and that may have something to do with the status assumed by top surgeons – medical hierarchy is almost its own character in the film.

Elizabeth Taylor (Elizabeth Banks) also has to deal with treatment of her gender – there’s some shocking sexism on display that you hope has been amplified for dramatic reasons and doesn’t reflect day-to-day reality – but you can tell that her haughtiness, her authority, is a shield that she carries through the world.

A young patient (Acacia O’Connor) is admitted with advanced sepsis. Taylor quickly deduces that she needs surgery but these things can be done with keyholes and cameras. Her registrar (or trainee surgeon), played by Richard Crouchley, is clearly nervous. He botches the final incision. But whose mistake is it? His, for putting too much pressure on after putting on too little? Or Taylor’s, for thinking that he could do it in the first place?

The film is engaging for most of the running time, including a well-disguised shock at the end of the second act, but piles it on a bit too thick in the final stages (possible having to adhere to some plot that might have worked better in the novel).

Jeffs – missing from cinema screens for 16 years – produces some of her characteristic ‘women in water’ sequences. (Her breakthrough short film in 1993 featured Fiona Samuel in a swimming pool and was called Stroke.) Simon McBurney delivers one of his trademark ‘snake in the grass’ performances and Banks, despite a wobbly accent, looks happy to be given a meaty and grown-up role.

A Mistake isn’t perfect but it is very respectable.

Next up, a film about the worst person in the world followed by one of the best.

The Apprentice is a super-villain origin story about New York real estate developer turned politician Donald J. Trump (Sebastian Stan) and his mentor, the wicked lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).

While I can admire the craft of it, I am ambivalent about the finished product. I don’t feel a particular need to learn any more about Trump – he may turn out to be more interesting to me after he’s dead and that’s a chance I am willing to take sooner rather than later – and any film where you find yourself feeling sympathy for the evil mass of contradictions that is Cohn is a film I want to be disinfected from.

Too close for comfort, too soon for any perspective.

My psyche was healed by Super/Man: the Christopher Reeve Story, a family and DC-approved biography that nevertheless manages to hint at some complexity in the all-American boy character.

Reeve had played – and become tired and typecast as – Superman in four films before suffering a spinal injury falling off a showjumping horse in 1995. It was touch and go whether he would survive – there’s a jaw dropping moment in the film where we hear how his mother argued to turn off the ventilator that breathed for him, even though he was far from brain dead.