The Sickroom

Through terrible experience, a doctor has become innured to his patients' suffering. Battling a storm, a litany of surreal obstacles and his own indifference, he struggles to reach a boy with fever on the other side of town. Based on Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor, this film, narrated in numbed tones by the doctor, employs silhouette, extreme close-up and other exaggerated, grotesque imagery to recreate all the claustrophobic, feverish qualities of the sickroom proper. The Sickroom marks the debut of a real talent.