Listless Horror Undermines Rounding’s Medical Drama

There’s an unfortunate, secondary aspect to the increased sheen of respectability that is now often conferred on the horror genre as a result of the drama-driven “prestige horror” era. With “elevated horror” projects now taken more seriously by critics and cinephiles, and films from the likes of Jordan Peele, Ari Aster or Robert Eggers seen as an effective way of fusing awards-worthy filmmaking with a commercially viable hook, there’s an unspoken implication: You can use “horror” to spruce up your otherwise lacking drama screenplay and intrigue a larger audience. And the less than inspiring effect is a film like Alex Thompson’s (Saint Frances, Ghostlight) Rounding, a jumbled mishmash of medical mystery, trauma-drenched drama and uninspired horror imagery that seems to be lacking commitment to the genre it would like to use as a prop for commercial viability. In Rounding, you can see the basic outline of a worthy psychological drama, but its screenplay fails to turn that vague shape into a fleshed-out story, instead relying on the viewer to fill in the gaps, while the horror elements merely detract from the material that might have worked otherwise. Its characters end up emaciated as a result.

Dr. James Hayman (Namir Smallwood, appropriately haunted) is a talented young medical resident who flees the big city after a traumatic, tragic interaction with a dying patient, resulting in a nervous breakdown. He seeks out a second year residency in the smaller, rural hospital of Greenville, a place where he can really “make a difference” according to paternal but close-minded supervisor Dr. Harrison (Michael Potts). Plagued by guilt and high self-expectations that he has failed to live up to, James is painfully fragile, easily flustered in pretty much any kind of interpersonal exchange. And considering that his job involves delivering news to patients that is often among the worst things they’ll ever hear, it’s no wonder that he’s quickly sent to take courses on improving his bedside manner and ability to effectively communicate. The arrival of mysterious teenage patient Helen (Sidney Flanigan), however, quickly comes to consume James’ attention as he begins to suspect (and obsess) that the sick girl’s mother (Karen Adso) may be playing some kind of nefarious role in her illness.

There’s a lot of potential for intense psychological probing in this framework that Rounding provides. Its title refers to the practice of doctors going to visit their many patients, and the way they must effectively segment their attention and empathy into bite-sized nuggets: They’re being asked to remember 100 different faces, names and illnesses, and to be in the moment with each person, compassionately listening to the latest developments without allowing the rest of the world to seep into each interaction. Much is made of the availability of empathy in Thompson’s film–the doctors in the bedside manner class take turns doing a dramatic reading about being asked “how are you feeling?”, but fail to take the reading’s meaning to heart. James is constantly asked variations on the same question–how are you feeling, are you okay–but no one doing the asking is actually paying any attention or absorbing the obvious answer that his demeanor and actions are giving off: He’s doing poorly, very poorly. At its heart, Rounding intends to be this kind of anxious drama about the insidious effects of burnout and the death of idealism in a world where we just don’t care enough about other people. This is also the material where Alex Thompson and his co-writer and brother Christopher Thompson, seem most comfortable.

But when Rounding dips its toes into more overtly stylized genre waters, (first psychological thriller, then seemingly supernatural horror) there’s little return on investment. The story requires James to become a paranoid, self-destructing wreck thanks to his noir-ish obsession with Helen’s case, but it pushes the character too far, too fast, asking Namir Smallwood’s game performance to quickly descend to a level of halting dysfunction that is difficult to realistically accept for a character who is meant to be a talented doctor. A man in a constant state of overwhelming panic clearly shouldn’t be doing this kind of work, and the amount of leash that James is given even as he’s very visibly coming apart at the seams becomes almost comical or surreal. We’re talking about a guy being found by other doctors and nurses weeping and rocking in a corner, collapsing in the corridors, losing track of days at a time, and hobbling around on a gruesomely injured and putrifying ankle, while none of the other doctors take notice or conclude that maybe this guy shouldn’t be administering care to other patients while he’s in this state. It fits with the commentary on the availability of empathy, but lacks believability all the same.

Worse still is the film’s contrived feeling and largely ineffective use of conventional supernatural horror imagery, the hospital setting and medical theming invoking a feeble echo of something like the nightmare visions of Jacob’s Ladder. The creatures Thompson encounters feel clumsily incorporated in these stock hallucinatory sequences, and there’s troublingly no question of reality: We can’t even consider the possibility that what James is encountering is “real,” when it’s all so clearly in his mind, just outward manifestations of grief and trauma, which is a modern horror milieu that will feel unavoidably familiar. The horror material is likewise held at arm’s length, making it feel like it was plucked from some other movie, just sequences designed to give James something to be momentarily alarmed about every 20 minutes or so. It all feels co-opted by someone who doesn’t really believe in this aspect of the film, and it ultimately serves to water down the medical mystery side of the proceedings by obscuring Helen in particular, who has no time to be fleshed out into anything approaching an engaging character. We question why James is so particularly obsessed and devoted to her case when their net total interactions seem to be about two or three minutes of total conversation. Like a rounding doctor, it’s difficult for the audience to build up much rapport with any of the characters outside of James, and even he can be a frustrating cipher given his lack of any other character to meaningfully interact with.

Even on a technical level, Rounding is particularly choppy and fragmented feeling. Editing and dialogue are often opaque and confusing, making it unclear when time has passed, while garbled line readings are drowned out by background noise. The same few lines of dialog and sentiment (“something’s not right”) find themselves endlessly repeated as James circles his pet case, making little if any headway. There’s not enough momentum to sustain even the medical mystery side of the drama, which makes the horror elements feel even more like a prop to stand up a story too insubstantial to exist on its own. The generous reading of all of this would be “the film is meant to disorient the viewer!” The less charitable take would be that even with an unreliable narrator, it’s nice for the audience to at least be able to understand their narrator.

Which is a shame, because it really does feel like one can envision an outline or framework for a film of this nature–an anxiety driven look into the high-pressure, unraveling world of a doctor on his rounds–that could be effective as either drama, or thriller. I’m not sure it would be as simple as allowing the demons of this calling to remain figurative rather than incarnate, but at least that would have allowed more time to flesh out these characters and see them as more recognizable human beings. “Rounding” is pretty much precisely what this angular, gaunt film could have used.

Director: Alex Thompson
Writer: Alex Thompson, Christopher Thompson
Stars: Namir Smallwood, Sidney Flanigan, Michael Potts, Rebecca Spence
Release date: Feb. 14, 2025

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.