Pathology

All I knew about the movie Pathology when I started watching it was that it was fairly new (released only a year back) and that it was a ‘macabre thriller’. It soon became clear that ‘grisly’ and ‘gruesome’ were equally appropriate adjectives. This is a story about a group of gifted young pathologists with a taste for the dark side. They play a ‘game’ which involves committing undetectable murders, on victims who deserve to die.

Or so clean cut intern Dr Ted Grey is led to believe when his colleagues inveigle him into playing the ‘game’. Ted is one of those guys who has it all. He’s clever, handsome and engaged to be married to a sexy young law student whose father is fabulously rich. Needless to say, things can only go downhill from there…

It turns out that the ‘game’ is not all that it seems and soon some very, very disturbing stuff starts to happen. There are those who say that the modern fascination with autopsies verges on the pornographic, and they might find some support for their case in Pathology. I’d like to think that the most successful crime novels and films of the future will deal with sex and violence much more subtly than this film. It is definitely not a movie for the squeamish, and the finale seemed to me to be completely over the top.

Yet although I don’t care for gorefests, I did think that the film – despite its unpleasant elements – was very well made. It left few taboos unbroken, but it would be good to think that, having got all that out of their system, the writers and production team will turn their talents to something rather less graphic, and with rather more meaning, in future.