‘Rounding' review: From Chicago's ‘Ghostlight' director, an eerie tale of a doctor's demons

Chicago Tribune

13-02-2025

Filmed before 'Ghostlight' in 2022, Chicago-based director and co-writer Alex Thompson's 'Rounding' has the less eerie-sounding title of the two. Yet titles are deceiving. The movie, shot in Elmhurst, Galena, Highland Park and around Chicago, makes its overdue theatrical premiere in tandem with streaming availability on various platforms, both distributed by the Music Box Films subsidiary Doppelganger Releasing.
It's a slippery picture, as well as a bit vague, sometimes deliberately, sometimes less so. At the same time 'Rounding,' named after the hospital rounds medical students conduct with their mentors, casts enough of an atmospheric spell in its tale of psychological demons haunting a young medical student to linger in your psyche a while.
After a breakdown following his role in the assisted suicide of a patient (Cheryl Lynn Bruce), James (Namir Smallwood) relocates to a small-town hospital in a place called Greenville. Much of 'Rounding' takes place in winter, and as James — a runner — jogs around town, he prepares himself mentally for the next day's demands. The training isn't for the weak. At one point, surrounded by other residents making rounds, James must deliver news to a lung cancer patient that is not encouraging. He bungles it, and it weighs on him, in addition to everything else shadowing his uncertain recovery.
This is a protagonist who has 'lost the thread,' in the the words of his unseen mother, with whom James has several phone calls across an unspecified time period. Strange things happen to, and within, this doctor in training: little time lapses, momentary fugue-state panic attacks. Meantime there's a mystery surrounding one of the patients James gets to know, an asthmatic young woman (Sidney Flanigan) whose ever-present mother (Rebecca Spence) doesn't like James' interrogation of her daughter's peculiar treatment plan. Something isn't right, James keeps saying. Is the something in his increasingly fraught head, or elsewhere?
Filmmaker Thompson, who co-wrote the script with his brother Christopher Thompson, suggests no one answer. At one point the manifestations of James' dread and guilt become, to him, at least, very real, and monstrous. Other developments nudge 'Rounding' into a bit of body horror; after a fall down a stairway, James spends the rest of the movie hobbling around on a bad and then festering leg. Meantime the patient with whom James has become medically obsessed gets better, then worse, then …
The premise may sound straightforward, and it is, almost. 'Rounding' works best, I think, when the 'almost' feeling sustains a kind of subterranean tension. While Smallwood's character as written is essentially reactive, the actor's facility with charged stillness sets the tone. This is not full-on scare stuff; it's more interior.
The supporting turns are very fine. Among others, there's Tony Award-winning director David Cromer as a somewhat cryptic bedside-manner coach, and Charin Alvarez who, in a three-minute scene as James' wary longtime colleague, conducts a mini-masterclass in humanizing exposition with quiet gravity. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company connections run deep in this ensemble, which includes the excellent Kelly O'Sullivan, screenwriter of 'Ghostlight' and 'Saint Frances' as well as screenwriter and co-director, with her partner Alex Thompson, of the forthcoming 'Mouse.'
The musical score by Quinn Tsan and Macie Stewart captures the main character's unease, slyly. 'Rounding' may not be enough for some, or clear enough in its intentions. Others don't mind ambiguity, or even elements of ambiguity's first cousin, opacity, if there are other things to appreciate. And there are.
'Rounding' — 3 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (some language and violence)
How to watch: Premieres Friday at Chicago's Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; musicboxtheatre.com. Also streaming online.