The direction is nearly flawless, the photography impressive, the acting professional, and the musical score consists of subdued strings -- no heavenly choirs or triumphant fanfares when a patient's life is unexpectedly saved. So why does it all seem unfocused? Diego is a doctor in a hospital in Spain. He's supposed to have lost compassion for those of his patients who are in pain, although I didn't see him as any more or less bored than any other doc.
At any rate, a man rushes his pregnant and dying girl friend into the hospital. Diego tells him that it's unlikely that either the girl or the baby will survive. The man pulls a gun and plugs Diego, before touching Diego's hands, then he eats his own pistola.
The man is dead and Diego severely wounded. They hurry Diego to his own hospital and try to stabilize him. There is a confusing shot of Diego lying on the gurney with his eyes staring at the camera and a sheet is pulled over his head, suggesting Diego has given up the ghost. But evidently he hasn't. What, then, did the hand of the potter shake? Diego recovers and thereafter things get a little weird. Diego resumes his duties and those of his patients who are on their way out begin to remit. However, Diego himself loses a family member he loves. And then, as the other patients do well, his daughter contracts an unnamed disease that looks like AIDS. And his wife develops something that sounds like leukemia.
Diego appears to reach the same conclusion I did. He can heal magically with his hands -- an ability possibly passed on to him by the suicide -- but in doing so he must lose someone he loves. Quid pro quo.
I filled that summary with conditionals -- "appears to", "evidently," and so on -- for a reason. The reason is that I wasn't at all sure I had a handle on what was going on. I don't know what the hell that drunken blond was doing in there. It's not exactly laid out in schematic fashion. It was disturbing enough that for a moment I thought I was stroking out myself.
The lack of focus and clarity aside, it's a good movie -- a hospital drama with supernatural overtones. In America we pride ourselves on having a superlative medical system, and we do, but in Spain the hospitals look just like American hospitals. The staff know what they're doing, expensive CAT scans are readily available, the docs are just as condescending, the nurses equally officious, and the appointments -- the rooms, the appliances, the floors, the scrubs -- are all properly Listerian. If there's a difference between ethos and eidos in American and Spanish hospitals, you'd never knew it from this movie.
I won't describe the ending, partly because it involves an heroic act of self sacrifice and partly because I'm not sure what happens.
