The Surgeon Film Review: First, Do Some Harm  

Michelle Yeoh plays a retired surgeon kidnapped and forced to operate on a crime boss in The Surgeon, Roshan Sethi’s lean, extremely gory thriller.  

Eliza (Michelle Yeoh, of Everything Everywhere All at Once) is a retired surgeon, bored out of her mind and mostly alone. She gets drugged and wakes up in an abandoned hospital, where a criminal crew needs a tumor cut out of their boss. At least that’s what she and we assume happened. She works out fast that she’s dead the second the operation ends. So she fights back with the one weapon nobody can take from her: total command of human anatomy.

Sethi (A Nice Indian Boy) is a radiation oncologist in Boston. He wrote this during a bout of COVID about a year and a half ago, a short runway for something this fully formed. His twin brother is a head and neck surgeon, and their mother ran a family clinic in Canada where they both grew up. At the premiere, he said Eliza is very much his mom, because “no kidnapper would make it out alive.”

His day job runs through the whole film. Sethi has Eliza visualize the inside of her target before she moves. Bones, tendons, organs, mapped in a beat. Then she strikes, and you know exactly what got severed and why a small wound is doing catastrophic damage. I won’t spoil her methods, because working them out is half the fun. The violence is gruesome and wildly inventive, and none of it feels invented.

Eliza is ornery and tightly wound with impossible standards, which isn’t unfamiliar ground for Yeoh. It stops mattering about ten minutes in. She trained with real surgeons before shooting, and you can see it in her hands. For 91 minutes she does exactly what you came for and holds nothing back.

Martin Freeman (The Hobbit) plays the crime boss like he’s been waiting his whole career for the offer. He’s so good at being bad that you almost root for him. Almost. He brings a smug, cold menace. Yeoh brings steel. Neither one blinks first. Sethi gives the goons personality too. Laurie Davidson and Yuri Kolokolnikov slowly work out what they’ve walked into. Joseph Mydell‘s Bill is the loveliest touch, a man from Eliza’s retiree support group who asks her to dinner. He has no idea what that invitation is about to bring down on him.

Thunder Road produced it, the same outfit behind John Wick, and the ambition to build something repeatable is right there on the surface. It looks better than a fast production has any right to. They filmed in Ireland doubling for a North American city. Outside the hospital it’s bright and easy, almost Californian. The costumes get fantastical, and I didn’t mind. The contrast pays off. Eliza’s home is orderly and controlled. Every space she’s dragged into after that is darker and harder to manage.

Sethi knows what a needle drop can do. A Thin Lizzy song in one action sequence had the crowd cheering almost as loud as the kills. The film owes a debt to the crackerjack thrillers of the nineties, and what he took is timing. He knows how long to stay in a scene, and when to let the next bad thing happen.

It isn’t a twisty film, and a few turns are easy to see coming. What it has instead is discipline. The script gives each scene what it needs and ties off what needs tying. A couple of threads stay loose, in case Eliza has more surgery in her future. Somebody will buy this at the right price and find they have a hit. It needs theaters and a real campaign. Find the loudest audience in your city, strap in, and get ready to wince. Yeoh is having more fun here than she’s had on screen in years, and it’s catching.

The Surgeon was screened at TIFF on September 12, 2026.