In the movies, monsters dwell in the dark places of the world: uncharted wilds, cavities within the earth's crust, mankind's refuse heaps, and heterodox science labs. Occasionally, though, they're the products of internalized emotions–feelings of guilt and shame, the kind of negative self-talk the counselor leading your group therapy sessions warns you against. They're our greatest personal regrets, given shape and animated by the stewed mess in our subconsciousness.
Rounding, the new film from Alex Thompson, isn't a horror film. It isn't a monster film either, strictly speaking. Instead, it's a psychological character drama nestled firmly in the neuroses of Thompson's protagonist, James Hayman (Namir Smallwood), a medical resident with high ambitions and higher anxiety. The movie opens with his foundational moment, a dreadful caregiving experience that leaves him traumatized and his patient in the morgue. James can't recover from the incident, though he desperately needs to move on from his placement at a big city hospital; he takes the phrasal verb literally, putting in for reassignment to Greenville, remote, rural, and relaxed compared to his previous gig, in every way but one.
The “one” is a grotesque aberration he encounters several times throughout Rounding, in dark, empty hallways where his guilt, PTSD, and the ankle injury he neglects to take proper care of make him prime quarry for the monster in its surprise appearances.
This isn't the essence of Thompson's cinema, from his 2019 debut, Saint Frances, to his 2024 sophomore effort, the spiritual tonic Ghostlight. (For the record, chronologically, Rounding is actually his second feature. But critics fumbled with comprehension and distributors didn't seem to know what to do with it back in 2022 when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Its release nearly three later is as much a miracle as a relief.)
Thompson's movies to date embody abiding compassion for their characters, conceived by his frequent collaborator, Kelly O'Sullivan–Saint Frances' star and screenwriter, screenwriter and Thompson's co-director on Ghostlight, and a supporting cast member in Rounding. Neither production dips its toes in genre; they remain grounded in the real world, though admittedly, one specter does cameo in Ghostlight.
That, however, is not the same as a chimeric abomination modeled on the seven-headed wild beast from the pages of the Bible, Revelation 13 and 17. It's valid to wonder why the figurative and actual Hell of Rounding is structured around creature feature interludes; contextualized in Thompson's filmography, it is the thing that should not be.
But if horror is a storytelling tradition and a style, it's a primal emotion that defines a significant chunk of the human condition, too. It therefore knows of no boundaries like “genre.” Plenty of films exist outside of horror's canon that nonetheless speak its language: Requiem for a Dream, Nightcrawler, Watership Down, Threads, Zodiac. Count Rounding in that number. Emotion and humanity are the point of the film, as well as the monster's presence.
“For me, you can go back to the classic Universal monsters,” says Cyle Williamson, key fabricator to Rounding's creature effects supervisor, Ben Gojer. He's also one of the puppeteers responsible for bringing the beast to life in the frame. “The humanity in all those monsters is very apparent, and it's very reflective of all the characters.”
Creature features come in all makes and models; they range from that Universal menagerie, a'la Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, to such cheese fests as Eight Legged Freaks, Them!, and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. We all love a good old fashioned popcorn flick. But a monster film can reach greater heights, too, where “you're digesting what the characters are going through, through a monster or creature, on an emotional level,” Williamson adds.
There is a monster in Rounding, but it's not a monster movie. The beast is Thompson's vehicle for metaphor —something to push Smallwood's wild-eyed and wired performance forward.
James is stalked by his personal demon in a handful of sequences judiciously deployed throughout the film. In each, the manifestations force Smallwood to modulate his acting by trading weary jitters for stark terror, a shift that communicates sensation on visceral terms. We recognize the grief, remorse, and overcompensating penance, influenced by interior recrimination James wrestles with.
Monster ambushes in a hospital's bowels, on the other hand, are unfamiliar territory. “You could just have [Smallwood] sitting there, breathing heavily, and looking scared, and that certainly can convey the emotion,” explains Andy Jarosz, animatronics designer to Gojer. “But when you introduce the creature, there's a whole other level of emotion to unpack there. It adds a dynamism you otherwise wouldn't get, especially in a movie like this where it's the last thing you're expecting.”
This, put lightly, is an understatement. Anyone who broadcast their predictions in 2019 about what a follow-up movie to Saint Frances might look like almost assuredly did not read their tea leaves correctly to see a hydra-adjacent thing staring back at them from the bottom of the saucer. Likelier they assumed that Thompson would stick to that film's basic formula, mixing frothiness with genuine concerns at top of mind for young people, and women in particular, today.
Rounding is an altogether different project from its opening scene, though, dreary in its visuals and defeated in tone, immediately cutting a startling contrast to Saint Frances' sunnier disposition. James is so crippled by his failure, which is alluded to more than it is explained before the denouement, that the only way he can see of unbridling himself from his penitence is to abandon his job, and the prospect of a bright future, and put his old life in the rearview. Forget about the monster. Rounding's setup alone decisively distinguishes it from Saint Frances (and, if we're skipping around years, Ghostlight).
But Jarosz is correct that the monster's emergence and countenance move the film into even further removed territory for Thompson, which is precisely what makes it a terrific object lesson for filmmakers to avoid pigeonholing. “I love genre, and I love stuff that plays hard to the genre that it is,” Gojer says, driving the point home. “It's a really useful storytelling device that can make things hit hard. But it's interesting to see something that's in between areas, pushing boundaries in a way that can be fun, and that expands our consciousness.”
Because, of course, monsters are fun, both to watch on screen and appreciate off-screen for all of the effort put into their construction. In Rounding's case, multiply that appreciation by the monster's utter wrongness.
Yes, this is something of a Barnum statement–definitionally, all monsters are “wrong” to one degree or another–but James' pursuer looks broken and disheveled like a dusty old prop from a Halloween episode of Fraggle Rock left misplaced and moldering in a disused studio warehouse; its fur looks sticky to the touch, its skin wet, and on each of its seven brows rests a glowing flame. It isn't fast. James lopes away from it on his bum ankle, and the misshapen creature lopes after him in kind, echoing its prey's own injury.
The connection between man and monster is key to its efficacy as a terrorizing element and as a tool for expanding James' humanity; he was never going to escape his guilt by leaving his old residency because his guilt comes with him everywhere he does.
But the pains taken by Gojer, Williamson, and Jarosz and the rest of their team, including Chicago puppeteers Kevin Wesson and Kelly Nesheim, to give Thompson's monster life add tangible weight to its form, and gravity to its sequences in the movie.
Start with a bodysuit, carving foam, and a hiking backpack frame; put the suit on the mannequin, then the frame, then sculpt the foam around the monster's makeshift skeleton. Puppet rods allowed for the creature's sluggish, inexorable gait, while key mechanic Jabu Dawdu manipulated its facial movements, down to the waggle of its hideous eyebrows.
Hearing the trio talk about the process, step by step by step, of vivifying the beast, the contrast between their fastidiousness and its results–straightforward, elegantly grotesque–nearly becomes comical: it is an engineering marvel as well as a product of deliberate planning, and at the same time, it reads like a product of Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett's worst nightmares.
This is all for the better. Rounding hangs chiefly on Smallwood's expression of James' crumbling psyche; every corner he turns around, his conscience and concomitant sense of disgrace outrun him. But because the film takes its cues from James, the monster is appropriate, and maybe even necessary, no matter that Thompson sets the narrative two or three neighborhoods away from “horror.”
Every second that it's on screen counts. Yet Gojer and the gang felt no more pressure in their work here than on dedicated horror movies. “I think the stakes are always the same,” Gojer says. “You can get so much through [the actors'] amazing performances, but having monsters in there like that gives you more tools that you can use to express what's going on in the character's story.” And what's going on in James' story by the time Rounding ends beneath the dazzling glare of a fireworks display and reveals the full breadth of his remorse is indeed monstrous enough that it takes a beast to pry out the truth.
Watch the Rounding trailer below and stream on Prime, or watch on VOD.
