The Surgeon, directed by Roshan Sethi, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. Michelle Yeoh stars as a former surgeon who is kidnapped and forced into an impossible choice. Martin Freeman co-stars.
Sethi is not a filmmaker by background alone. He is a practicing radiation oncologist and co-creator of Fox's medical drama The Resident, a combination that positions The Surgeon as something harder to dismiss than a typical genre exercise. The clinical world is not a setting he approximates. He built it.
For Yeoh, the preparation was procedural. She trained with Dr. O'Keefe, a surgeon at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, where the film was shot. According to Sethi, O'Keefe "ran Michelle through everything, like how to scrub in, how to operate, how to do the knots, everything." Yeoh was direct about the intention: "It was really important for me, so that when I did the movements and all that, it looked real."
The result is a film that treats medical precision the way other thrillers treat weapons: as something both beautiful and dangerous in the right hands. WME and Legendary are handling worldwide sales. A distribution deal has not yet been announced.