Director: Kirby Dick
Year Released: 2018
Rating: 2.0
Documentarians Dick and Amy Ziering cover the controversial area of medical implants and how many people, over the years, have suffered as a result ... and how certain products have slid by the Food & Drug Administration because of a loophole (the 510(k) clearance). The stories by the women (and men) about how these devices have led them through a path of medical hell are affecting - and certainly Essure should have never existed in the first place - although the film, in its droning misery, becomes a kind of Nightmare Infomercial: instead of happy faces telling you about, say, the Slap Chop, it's despondent ones talking about how the things they 'purchased' caused their internal organs to fall out of their bodies and how they went berserk because a hip replacement was flooding their systems with high levels of cobalt. As an 'advocacy' film it was needed (Bayer folded ... Johnson & Johnson doubled down), but it's also pessimistic to a fault (hey, what about the success stories? any of those around? not one?). Who knew that back in 1997, Dick's recording of a man with cystic fibrosis driving a nail through a rather sensitive part of his body with a hammer would be the most fitting visual metaphor for his filmmaking career?
