Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston has left the country, posting up this week in the Great White North to cover the 51st Toronto International Film Festival. As usual, and perhaps now more than ever, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing 2026 coverage, get rolling with our official curtain-raiser, and revisit the complete Vanyaland coverage archives from past TIFF editions.
There are few better pleasures than going into a film like Roshan Sethi’s The Surgeon without knowing anything beyond the familiar high-concept logline and discovering that the movie is both vastly different than what you expected and a pretty goddamn good time. Its origins are fascinating — Sethi, an oncologist who once practiced at Brigham and Women’s in Boston, puts every bit of his medical training to use here — and, as paired with a swell, stoic lead performance from Michelle Yeoh, it may be one of the nuttiest thrillers I’ve seen at TIFF in quite a while (much as Tuner was for the crowds that saw that here last year) The squeamish should beware, though: If you can’t handle ingrown toenail removal videos on YouTube or faint at the sight of a paper cut, you might want to avoid this. It is, after all, The Surgeon.
Yeoh plays — you guessed it — a freshly retired surgeon struggling with not having a “purpose” anymore. Her monk-like devotion to her profession kept her from starting a family or forming bonds with colleagues or co-workers, though she did take out a hefty insurance policy on both her hands. But she’s lonely. If you think it’s hard making friends in your 30s, try waiting until you’re pushing 70. A kind-hearted member of her book club tries to make a connection, but she’s a bit too withdrawn to reciprocate it, being used to navigating the world on her own. Yeoh sells this wonderfully, giving us a warm window into an otherwise icy character’s inner life. Such is her little world when the Irish mob makes a jaunt up from Boston to New Hampshire to pay her a visit. She’s drugged, bound, and driven to an abandoned hospital. Roused by one of the goons, she is given some medical records and told to get ready to operate.
The surgeon knows she’s in deep shit. She’s seen all of their faces, and that they’ll probably kill her (and the similarly abducted anesthesiologist) as soon as she puts down her scalpel. What little leverage she has is quickly gone when she tries to barter with her patient’s life. They know better. She’s taken an oath to do no harm to those in her care, and their boss (Martin Freeman) is no exception. Unluckily for the assembled mobsters, that only applies to the man on the table. What follows is a fascinating array of medically accurate maiming, done with professional precision as she attempts, for once, to save her life instead of another’s.
Yeoh is just so much fun here – she’s a boomer doctor who can only operate with Thin Lizzy on the stereo (and yes, “The Boys Are Back in Town” is played loud and proud), slices the crusts off of her breakfast toast with Hattori Hanzo precision, and is smart and resourceful enough to know that her operating tools would serve her better than any gun. Her rapport with the rest of the cast is strong, but she’s best when stoic, puzzling her way around the obstacles set in front of her by the mob. She deflates a dude’s lung with the same steel-eyed determination she applied to, well, taking care of a particularly, uh, bad rectal problem that came through her ward.
Those gross moments of gore give the film its “Oh shit” impact, and Sethi’s experience ensures it never feels as wantonly grotesque as it could in other hands. She visualizes her moves as if they were anatomy class models, and Sethi cuts from, say, a shot of her starting to slice at the tendons in a gunman’s hands to a visible-man shot of his forearms and what’s going on inside while she cuts (I’m being vague here to prevent some readers from throwing up). Credit The Street Fighter or the X-Ray injuries in Blitz: The League or Mortal Kombat X, but Sethi’s application feels wonderfully unique in comparison to other genre works. Yet the whole film is smartly constructed and propulsive – no John Wick: Medicine Woman jokes here, please – that it might work even without them. Let’s be real, though: That shit is a selling point for a lot of us out there, and The Surgeon will be a metaphorical defibrillator for those in need of a good shock.