From Yes, Madam in 1985 to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000 all the way to Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2023, Michelle Yeoh has firmly established herself as an acting legend, especially when it comes to action movies. Her decades of excellent work were finally acknowledged when she won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Everything Everywhere, but she’s still looking for new challenges.
She found one in The Surgeon, a new action movie from writer-director Roshan Sethi. Yeoh plays Eliza, a surgeon who’s being forced into early retirement after a decades-long career. When she’s kidnapped to perform life-saving surgery on a criminal (Martin Freeman), she has to fight her way out, and her decades of surgical experience come in very handy.
Reviews for The Surgeon are coming in, and so far they’re uniformly positive. “This is a wild and unexpected thrill from start to finish,” writes Joonatan Itkonen for Region Free. “Yeoh is cool as ice, the action is inventive and shocking, and I could never guess where the film would go next.” Travis Hopson of Punch Drunk Critics is similarly effusive: “It’s a fantastic role for Yeoh that shows once again that she is one of the most well-rounded actors around, as credible when beating up a bruising Russian thug as she is performing complicated surgery,” he writes. “While Freeman makes a solid villain, this is Yeoh’s movie and it’s one that her fans will have to be in a coma to miss.”
A24
Multiple critics note that Roshan Sethi is a physician himself; he’s one of the creators of the six-season medical drama The Resident, and still practices medicine part-time. His knowledge lends a level of believability to The Surgeon that it wouldn’t otherwise have. “The filmmaker does a fantastic job sometimes demonstrating, sometimes explaining, how Eliza takes down each of her adversaries,” explains Gregory Ellwood for The Playlist. “Killers, that she notes, are often twice her weight or height. As Eliza makes one stab or slice after another, Sethi will cut to a shot inside the body or a portion of the body without skin, to make it all as medically accurate as possible. For the most part, it’s a pretty creative, although admittedly gruesome, choice.”
This sounds like a great way for The Surgeon to stand out in a crowded market for action movies, which have seen a resurgence thanks in part to franchises like John Wick. Basil Iwanyk, who produced all four John Wick movies, is also a producer on The Surgeon, which can only help.
Some critics are slightly less enthusiastic, although the movie doesn’t have any negative reviews. Jared Mobarak of The Film Stage acknowledges that The Surgeon “might not break new ground,” but concedes that it tweaks the standard action movie formula enough that audiences won’t care. Aesthetically speaking, Gregory Ellwood thinks the movie looks “a little too drab at times,” but that doesn’t stop it from pulling off “some fun set pieces.”
The Surgeon does not have a release date yet, but this looks like one to keep an eye on.
Release Date
September 12, 2026
Runtime
92 minutes
Director
Roshan Sethi
Writers
Roshan Sethi
Producers
Adam Kolbrenner, Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee, John Schoenfelder, Lia Buman, Neil Shah, Patrick Wachsberger, Russell Ackerman, Steve Klinsky, Tim Headington, Diarmaid Odhran McGrath