Sony Pictures has acquired North American and select international distribution rights to The Surgeon, the Michelle Yeoh-led action thriller that emerged as one of the hottest sales titles out of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The deal came after multiple competing bids, with Sony also picking up rights in Latin America, Italy, China, and Hong Kong.
The film stars Michelle Yeoh as Eliza Lim, a newly retired surgeon who is abducted by a criminal gang, led by Martin Freeman, and forced at gunpoint to operate on a member with a life-threatening medical condition. Drawing on decades of surgical expertise, Eliza turns her precise anatomical knowledge into a weapon, fighting her way out using the same skills that once made her a healer. The cast also includes Laurie Davidson, Yuri Kolokolnikov, and Joseph Mydell.
Real-life practicing physician Roshan Sethi wrote and directed the film, following his earlier feature A Nice Indian Boy. Sethi, who co-created the Fox medical drama The Resident and continues working roughly two months a year as a radiation oncologist at Boston’s Mass General Brigham, pushed to have his M.D. credential included in his directing credit specifically to help sell the film’s medical authenticity to audiences. “The fact that it might be real is part of what makes it interesting to watch,” he told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the film’s TIFF premiere. “You feel like you’re being exposed to something that you didn’t know before.”
The film premiered as a Centrepiece selection at TIFF to an outright rapturous critical response, currently holding a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes across its early reviews.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Caryn James called it “a genre-bending swirl that is part The Pitt (but gorier), part tense crime thriller, part action movie and part midnight movie, all infused with witty touches,” adding, “It is wildly entertaining.” Deadline’s review leaned into the film’s over-the-top premise, writing that it “makes The Pitt look like PAW Patrol” and calling it “a manual for turning bad guys inside out, literally,” while crediting fight choreographer Laurent Demanioff for “dazzling” action sequences built around Yeoh’s performance.
Speaking about what drew her to the project, Yeoh explained she had been looking for a different kind of action role entirely. “I’m always on the lookout for doing an action film, but not a normal action film,” she said. “There’s so many amazing big stunts featuring a lot of physicality, gore and brutality. So, what attracted me was looking at this and being like, ‘Oh wow, I haven’t done action like this before.’”
She also spoke about the specific physical challenge of playing a surgeon rather than a trained fighter, noting, “It was very interesting while we were filming because I play a surgeon, and not a martial artist, so the way that I move should not be smooth.” The role marks Michelle Yeoh’s first true leading action performance since her Best Actress Oscar win for Everything Everywhere All at Once, following supporting turns in bigger ensemble projects like the Wicked films.
The Surgeon is produced by John Wick franchise veterans Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee, and Diarmuid McGrath of Thunder Road, alongside Tango’s Tim Headington, Lia Buman, and Neil Shah, Steve Klinsky, Adam Kolbrenner of Lit Entertainment Group, John Schoenfelder, and Russell Ackerman, with a long list of additional executive producers including Yeoh herself. The deal comes as one of two major buzzy acquisitions to emerge from this year’s TIFF Midnight Madness lineup, alongside IFC’s River, which Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster ultimately outbid Sony for.
With a rare perfect critical score, a starring vehicle tailor-made for Michelle Yeoh’s return to leading action work, and a filmmaker whose actual medical background adds an unusual layer of credibility to the premise, The Surgeon is shaping up to be one of the more distinctive genre releases on Sony’s upcoming slate.
