Binge-r #250: Dr Death + Katla
Doctor Doom: Joshua Jackson (Christopher Duntsch) in Dr Death
DR DEATH
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming
Often a show with solid creative elements will be elevated by a single piece of work that sharpens everything around it. It might be an accomplished supporting performance or exacting direction, but in the case of this real life drama about horrific medical malpractice the key that unlocks the story is the sound effect used when an incompetent surgeon undertaking routine back surgery takes a chisel to his patient’s spine. The sharp, splintering crack, held against a shot of a defenceless patient on the operating table, is terrifying, summing up the premise of this American series: what happens when the doctor you trust is not only lacking in crucial skills, but also has no sense of care for you as a human being.
In this eight part series, based on a successful podcast of the same name, that doctor is Christopher Duntsch, who is cannily played by the inherently likable Joshua Jackson (Dawson’s Creek, Fringe). There is no mystery about either the character’s fate or intent: the first shot is of Duntsch in prison (where he is in real life) and the early scene of another surgeon, Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin), performing “revision surgery” on one of Duntsch’s patients starts a roll call of culpable behaviour. “Everyone in the room could have done better than him,” an attending nurse who witnessed Duntsch butcher a simple procedure tells Henderson.
Lively in its narrative leaps but unobtrusive with the direction, Dr Death is a horror story about systematic failings. Duntsch is passed from one Texan hospital to another, and despite the human cost of his failings – one patient is left a quadriplegic – it’s not easy for Henderson and a fellow concerned surgeon, Randall Kirby (Christian Slater), to stop him operating on vulnerable patients. Privilege and authority allow him to destroy lives, even after a young state prosecutor, Michelle Shughart (AnnaSophia Robb) becomes involved. The middle of the series lags a touch, but the show works as an inquest into inexplicable failure – delivered with a smiling veneer – and a nightmarish vision of greed overtaking responsibility. If hospitals scare you already this will scrape your nerve ends, especially once you hear that chisel at work.
A Song of Ice and Fire: A new arrival in Katla
KATLA S1 (Netflix, all eight episodes now streaming): There’s a recognisable template for this supernatural Icelandic drama about a small town living beneath an active volcano that starts disgorging ash-covered people: the eerie existential machinations of Stan’s Les Revenants and the dread-laden complications of fellow Netflix European drama Dark. With the Icelandic landscape as an otherworldly backdrop, Katla will satisfy those who like their mysteries drawn out and with lashings of inexplicable events. Icelandic filmmaker and co-creator Baltasar Kormakur (2 Guns, Everest) establishes a rich palette with the initial episodes, and while the show has a commitment to plenty of tropes – is there an old person who offers foreboding commentary? Sure is – there’s also a genuine sense of not wanting to explain everything and neatly wrap it up. If you want something grim and impervious, here is your next journey into darkness.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972, 122 minutes) is a grimy seventies crime thriller, with some fascinating psychological tendrils, that stars Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw as a fractured couple on the run after pulling a heist; The Dead Don’t Die (2019, 104 minutes) is somewhat inert as Jim Jarmusch films go, but this deadpan zombie apocalypse does feature the stacked cast of Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and Adam Driver.
New on Stan: I’m not sure it deserved the Best Picture Oscar, but Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012, 116 minutes) is a capable thriller (and Hollywood love letter) about the CIA agent using a fake film to smuggle wanted fugitives out of revolutionary Iran; The Wedding Singer (1998, 97 minutes) is an enjoyable, retro-rock reminder that Adam Sandler comedies were always better when Drew Barrymore was his co-star.
New on SBS on Demand: It’s criminal that the The Way Back (2010, 128 minutes) is the last film Peter Weir, one of Australia’s greatest filmmaker, has directed in just over a decade, but this story of inmates – played by Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, and Colin Farrell among others – who undertake a vast and risky trek to escape a 1940s Soviet gulag has a scale that clashes with the desperate survival stakes so that the panoramic overwhelms the intimate.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about Netflix’s brilliantly absurdist sketch comedy I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson and Stan’s pick up of the Australian science-fiction series Cleverman.
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