Rounding

The first is enkoimesis, the ritualistic dream state in which patients in ancient Greece were visited by a “physician-God” thought to be the son of Apollo. The second is rounding itself, the term now used to describe a doctor visiting his or her patients in the hospital — a much more quotidian process, but one that has a dreamlike quality of its own in Alex Thompson’s long-delayed psychodrama.

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After making a fatal mistake during his residency, James (Namir Smallwood) leaves his big-city hospital to be a “country mouse” at a rural facility. The transition doesn’t go smoothly. When he isn’t missing pages from the nursing staff, he’s having vaguely religious hallucinations and fixating on a young woman (Sidney Flanigan of Never Rarely Sometimes Always) whose chronic asthma he can’t make sense of. What he isn’t doing is sleeping, getting his own injury looked at, or inspiring much confidence in his colleagues and higher-ups. If he can’t take care of himself, how can he take care of anyone else? Thompson maintains a subjective point of view throughout, meaning we’re just as surprised as James is to learn that it’s Monday night rather than Friday morning after waking from his latest episode.

But lots of doctors don’t really sleep, James reasons, and his patients’ welfare is more important than his own. Rural medicine, his new boss explains to him, is about relationships. If you lose the relationship with your patient, you lose everything. James’ bedside manner is lacking, meaning he has to work harder to maintain those relationships than other residents. And yet it comes more easily with Helen, at least at first. She seems chipper despite her frequent visits to the hospital, where James can’t help looking in on her even when he isn’t supposed to. Something about her condition doesn’t add up, and his concern quickly turns to obsession.

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“You know, I bet we’d be friends out in the real world,” she tells him during one of those check-ins. She’s more right than she knows, but not about their would-be friendship. A hospital isn’t quite the real world under the best of circumstances, and certainly not in Rounding. Cloistered and increasingly surreal, it’s a liminal space in which patients and doctors alike are constantly transitioning from one state to another: lucid and dreaming, alive and dead, often in a way that overlaps and disorients.

If he can't take care of himself, how can he take care of anyone else?

It took three years for the film to graduate from the festival circuit to today’s theatrical release — a bit of rounding, you might say — and one imagines the success of last year’s Ghostlight, which Thompson co-directed alongside his Saint Frances co-writer and star Kelly O’Sullivan, helped it finally secure distribution. The wait was worth it, even as Rounding at times feels more like a resident than a fellow: still in the process of becoming whatever it’s meant to be, leaving questions unanswered in a manner that suggests it might not know them either.

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Fortunate, then, that movies don’t need to be as definitive as diagnoses. Rounding gets by well enough on vibes, with Smallwood and Flanigan’s performances doing some heavy lifting of their own. “Something really bad must have happened to you,” James’ colleague tells him as his condition noticeably worsens. His response? “Something bad is happening right now.”