Critic Reviews

Rounding can be a tough film and one that puts its viewers through a lot, but the investment is well worth it.

Rounding doesn’t offer answers, but it does offer a deep, unsettling dive into the fragility of the human mind and just how far someone can go when pushed to their limits.

This is one of those movies where on a handful of occasions, you feel the urge to look away from the screen or at least squint a bit, because you know something truly (and wonderfully) dreadful is about to happen. But you’re not going to look away, because that’s the chilling fun of it.

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.

A tense, occasionally terrifying thriller that’s hard to look away from, though what it’s ultimately trying to accomplish with all that energy isn’t always so clear.

Rounding doesn’t quite make its own case, in terms of the symbolism it throws into the mix, but as a portrayal of a man falling apart from overwhelming stress it works quite well.

While many movies these days feel stretched too thin to sustain their few real ideas, Rounding emerges in the end as a project that ought to have shed some surplus ideas to better focus on a few. Either that, or the compact pacing should’ve been eased to allow them all more breathing space.

In Rounding, you can see the basic outline of a worthy psychological drama, but its screenplay fails to turn that vague shape into a fleshed-out story, instead relying on the viewer to fill in the gaps, while the horror elements merely detract from the material that might have worked otherwise.

Despite a solid performance from the film’s lead and an interesting character arc, Rounding winds up getting a bit lost in all it’s trying to accomplish.

A few scenes show glimmers of promise for what Alex Thompson can achieve when he’s more in his wheelhouse. It’s a shame that the horror and tension that make up the bulk of Rounding are so clearly outside of it.