Pathology (2008)

Pathology arrives from 2008 with the confidence of a film that believes it has stumbled onto something forbidden. It has not. A Harvard valedictorian named Teddy Grey joins an elite pathology residency and falls in with a clique of sociopathic residents who murder strangers and then compete to autopsy them. The premise is a morgue-set parlor game, and the film plays it with the sweaty self-satisfaction of a teenager who has just discovered Nietzsche.

The picture carries almost no social agenda to speak of. A handful of non-white performers appear in supporting roles, present but unremarked, which is the entire extent of its casting ambition. Women fare worse: a female pathologist and a female killer occupy the frame, yet the film mostly uses them as bodies to be opened and prizes to be fought over by men. There is no feminist argument here, only a lurid rivalry wearing a lab coat. Race, class, climate, disability, and history are simply not on the menu. The villains are affluent professionals bored with comfort. The film never asks why.

What remains is exploitation with a scalpel budget. It is competently grimy, occasionally tense, and entirely without a message, which in this case is its one honest virtue. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns. The corpses pile up, the gas gets left on, and the credits roll over a soundtrack nobody remembers. We are left to file it accordingly: a nasty little genre exercise that offends no ideology because it has none. The sommelier sets down the glass and reaches for the next bottle.