Alex Thompson’s thriller Rounding doesn’t lack for details. Early on, after medical resident James (Namir Smallwood) shuffles between hospital rooms in burgundy scrubs, he releases his nervous energy by jogging through a blanket of snow, making the name of the rural town in which the story is set, Greenville, feel like a knowing joke. When he arrives home, it’s to a cramped basement apartment where the sounds of the upstairs neighbors echo through the ceiling. Would that Rounding’s story were as memorable as those details.
Rounding’s rudderless screenplay, which Thompson co-wrote with his brother Christopher Thompson, casts out in several directions at once, as though hoping that one of them will have a substantial impact on the viewer. James has transferred to Greenville after a breakdown, hoping the rural change of scenery can allow him to get his groove back. But complicating matters is that he has to solve the mystery of a young asthma patient, Helen Adso (Sidney Flanigan), whose treatments are strangely disproportionate to her symptoms.
All the while, James suffers those overly familiar horror-movie hallucinations that represent a fracturing state of mind. Some of them contain a monster, glimpsed so briefly across Nate Hurtsellers’s shadowy images that the creature could be wholly excised from Rounding and the audience wouldn’t be the wiser. The horror never sticks, to say the least.
Even setting the intermittent hallucinations aside, Thompson’s film builds to a rather ridiculous fever pitch, with an alarmingly disheveled James, though hobbling around on a rotted foot, his eyes wide and twitching, still being allowed to go about his job as usual. You’d be justified in worrying about this guy if you encountered him on the street, let alone if he were your doctor.
But for a short while, there’s a natural confidence to the images and editing that manages to disguise the film’s scatteredness. Thompson has done laudable work on indie dramas like Saint Frances and Ghostlight with his partner, Kelly O’Sullivan. A few scenes, like one set in the acting class that James reluctantly attends to improve his bedside manner, show glimmers of promise for what Thompson can achieve when he’s more in his wheelhouse. It’s a shame that the horror and tension that make up the bulk of Rounding are so clearly outside of it.
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