‘The Pitt’ Meets ‘John Wick’ in Michelle Yeoh’s September 12 Action Thriller

Michelle Yeoh is returning to action, though not in any way you would expect. The premise of The Surgeon alone has made it one of the Toronto International Film Festival’s most talked-about titles. Yeoh plays a retired surgeon who gets abducted by a criminal gang and forced to operate on one of its members.

What her captors fail to consider is that 35 years spent cutting people open also makes her frighteningly good at the opposite. That is where the comparisons with The Pitt and John Wick come from.

The Pitt side is the medical realism, with the film leaning into the harsh, genuinely gory reality of surgery rather than cleaning it up for the camera. The John Wick side is the action, but it is not just tonal either. Thunder Road’s Basil Iwanyk produced John Wick, and Patrick Wachsberger distributed it. Both are behind this one too.

Michelle Yeoh’s The Surgeon Will Premiere at TIFF

Michelle Yeoh in a still from The Surgeon | Credits: TIFF

The Surgeon screens as part of TIFF’s Centrepiece programme, and it arrives without a distributor attached. That makes it one of the festival’s hottest sales titles, with buyers expected to circle it hard after the premiere. The timing is good, since TIFF is launching its own marketplace this year.

The practical takeaway for viewers is that there is no release date yet. Whoever buys it will set one, which likely pushes the film to 2027 at the earliest.

As for the story, Yeoh’s surgeon steps away after a long and accomplished career, only to be dragged back to the operating table at gunpoint. The gang holding her is led by Martin Freeman, and one of its members has a life-threatening condition that needs fixing. She is equally capable of healing and harming, and the film makes full use of both.

It is a real swerve for Yeoh. She built her reputation on martial arts in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Tomorrow Never Dies, but here the weapon is anatomy rather than kung fu. The producers are also openly hoping it becomes a franchise.

Michelle Yeoh’s Action Thriller Comes from a Real Doctor

Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once | Credits: A24

The authenticity is not an accident in The Surgeon. According to THR, writer-director Roshan Sethi is a practicing radiation oncologist who spends roughly two months a year on call at Boston’s Mass General Brigham.

Sethi has been mining his medical background on screen for years. He started as a staff writer on Code Black before co-creating The Resident, which ran for six seasons on Fox. His features, though, went in a completely different direction.

7 Days won him a Film Independent Spirit Award in 2021, and A Nice Indian Boy starred Jonathan Groff. Both were warm comedies, which makes an action thriller full of surgical carnage a genuine left turn. Yeoh took the preparation seriously enough to attend in-person instruction at the Royal College of Surgeons.

Behind the camera, Iwanyk and Erica Lee produce for Thunder Road, alongside John Schoenfelder and Russell Ackerman for NeoText, Adam Kolbrenner for Lit Entertainment, and Steve Klinsky for Untravelled Worlds.

What are your expectations for Yeoh’s The Surgeon? Let us know in the comments below!