Fantasia Review: '12 Hour Shift' is a Slow-Witted Spiral of Toxicity
“You look like you work in a butcher shop,” comments a police officer to Mandy (Angela Bettis), a hospital nurse in writer/director Brea Grant’s sophomore feature 12 Hour Shift. She stands in the morgue covered with blood beside a corpse, literally and figuratively caught red handed. The butcher shop metaphor is unwittingly apt. A subsect of the hospital staff is running a black market organ scheme and Mandy is tasked with the riskiest act of the con: harvesting the organs from their hosts. It is precisely during this act where the officer interrupts her. Fortunately for Mandy, he is too oblivious to catch on, but he won’t be the last.
Set in 1999 Arkansas, Mandy possesses a thousand-yard stare that’s familiar to nurses. “You ever smell sadness?” Mandy is once asked off-handedly. “Only every day,”she responds. We understand her while she makes her floor rounds involving both co-workers and patients whose thin facades of niceties are stripped away within moments. The people that don’t insult her are nearing the end of their lives and are filled with regret on a life gone by. We get the sense that years of these interactions have been taxing on Mandy, especially when she frequently resorts to snorting medications to stay alert and effective on the job. She’s an addict just like the overdosing felon (David Arquette) that was recently brought in to Mandy’s floor with hushed whispers.
A wrench is thrown into the smooth-running illegal operation of the hospital in the form of Mandy’s simple cousin Regina (Chloe Farnworth) who misplaces a crucial delivery. Pressured by the henchman involved with the scheme, the hospital becomes a lynchpin for a downward spiral of calamity, buffoonery, and exploitative shenanigans that echo of the inept criminals stories often found in films of the Coen Brothers. But Grant brings an even more off-kilter spin to this tale. Like the officer that discovers Mandy in the morgue, 12 Hour Shift hangs its hat on entertainment from slow-witted characters. The ride is somewhat uneven, especially as loose-ends quickly tied up before the film’s conclusion, but Grant and 12 Hour Shift are at their best when Mandy’s common sense is not shared by those around her. In fact, that common sense is often unfairly begrudged. “Never trust a skinny woman,” a rail-thin Mandy is told pointedly. “While we’re eating, they’re plotting.” The dramatic irony is thick as many of these bumbling characters could have done with a little bit more plotting and scheming.
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