Patient 001
The film made here by Katie Fleischer, from a script she wrote with Jason Dietz, has some really great ideas. “Patient 001” starts exceptionally well, and builds its narrative dilemma successfully. The rest of the film after that, however, unfolds in a way that is relatively predictable and should be terrifying, and might be if all the characters realized what was going on prior to the final minutes. Or rather, maybe it shouldn’t have been so obvious all along to the audience what was happening.
“Patient 001” begins in a hospital, and, in one room, a distraught wife, Josie (Rosie Fellner), is looking over her comatose husband, Leo (Michael Hayden). She has sex with him, to the enjoyment of the security team watching on camera, and the intrigue of a doctor (Michel Gill), who may have a way to help Josie get through her grief. She obviously wants to get pregnant, but a fertility doctor says it is hopeless; the doctor, Alec, has a method that would allow her to become pregnant with a clone of Leo. It’s never been done before, but she’s desperate. She gets pregnant, and brings the clone to term, only to have Leo, whose condition was thought to be irreversible, wake up. That’s when the trouble begins.
I will withhold any further story points beyond that, because how things start to go wrong is one of the more interesting aspects of the film. Well, it should be interesting; once the story goes in motion as Josie and Leo try to get back to their normal life, it is pretty obvious how things will be going wrong. The choices made throughout the film are very good ones that lead to a dark conclusion, but we also kind of see them coming from a mile away, and wish some of the characters had a bit more awareness that might make the tension feel less out of plot mechanics and more out of character dilemmas. Fleischer has a good vision for bringing this story to life, and there are visual ideas for how Leo reacts to his clone that are simple and effective. Unfortunately, the execution of the narrative is not; we see how this is going to go, and it is predictable, and loses steam along the way.
