12 Hour Shift (2020) Another Bettis Star Turn (Review)

Frightfest Presents returns in 2021 to release a smaller title that played a previous Festival, this time it’s the turn of actor/sophomore director, Brea Grant and her Crime Thriller/Comedy Horror, 12 Hour Shift. Grant made her name as an actor who works within the American indie horror scene, a highlight, for me, was last year’s After Midnight – a film that deserved to have far more eyes on it than it eventually did. Even with an Arrow Video Blu-ray release. That film was ostensibly a relationship drama of two 30-somethings coming to terms with what they meant to each other, albeit one with a literal monster in the mix. By the same token, 12 Hour Shift is superficially a crime thriller about a haggard nurse running an organ trafficking racket albeit one that comments on the overworked nature of medical professionals, up and down the land.

12 Hour Shift is led by Angela Bettis as the exasperated, desperate nurse, Mandy, and prior to watching Grant’s movie, the only exposure I had with the actor was in Lucky McKee’s May. Even if I didn’t enjoy McKee’s movie as many others did, her performance was a revelatory one. Playing a tender young woman who realised that the world wasn’t prepared to make room for her, so-called, weirdness. As Mandy, she could conceivably be playing the same character if this wasn’t set in 1999. Here, she wears a lifetime of stress and horror upon her exhausted face. She only needs to utter a few words for you to know she is tired of enduring the hand that life has dealt her, so instead of thinking her a monster for dealing in the organs of the recently deceased, you understand her plight implicitly and hope she escapes this nightmare of a shift. If the film achieves nothing else, Bettis’s performance is a marvel of empathy.

It’s probably about time that I fleshed out the plot. Nicholas (wrestling’s Mick Foley) runs an organ trafficking ring, he sends Mandy’s cousin (only by marriage), Regina (Chloe Farnworth) to the hospital to pick up a Kidney. A transfer that goes awry thanks to Regina spending more time talking about her technique of using soda’s to keep the organs cool. Annoyed, Nicholas demands Regina go back to the hospital to get the organ he paid for and if she doesn’t return within the hour, he’ll send one of his heavies to drag her back, and he’ll just take hers. At the hospital, there’s also a convict under police escort, the cop-killing Jefferson (David Arquette), to make this concoction that little bit headier. Making a mess of it a second time, Regina takes it upon herself to get the kidney herself, murdering anyone she thinks she could take the organ from – and just to show how badly equipped she is, her first victim is an older man on a dialysis machine. From that point, everything that could go wrong does.

I hate to be overly negative about any aspect of any budget production but in this case, it is unavoidable. It’s the score from Matt Glass (who pulls a double shift as cinematographer). His composition draws too much attention to itself, Glass mixes jazz drumming with electronics and backing operatic vocals in a project that could be eccentric yet spins a little closer to the broody. Someone like English multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan would do a fantastic job, or Gazelle Twin would be two ideal examples. Instead, this feels more like an experimental music side-project than a score designed to support and heighten Grant’s script and direction – allowing them to reach their full potential. The score is out for itself, movie-be-damned.

Honestly, this spectrum of violence dark comedy crime capers is almost as over-saturated as the indie horror but if even Grant’s film does buckle slightly under the weight of so many moving parts it more than gets by on the innate charisma of her directing and the performance of her leading woman. This overwhelming amount of plot and character is helped, I feel, by the final shot. After all the violence, bloodshed and unnecessary death have calmed down, we enter the hospital for a second time and who should we see walk behind them? Nicholas. Even after all that anarchy, nothing has changed and these poor nurses and doctors are going to be subjected to “12 Hour Shift, Part 2”. A small shot like that establishes a world bigger than the preceding 88 minutes, something which too few indie genre films bother with never mind consider.

Here’s looking forward to Brea Grant’s third film, something which holds incredible promise.

Thank you for reading Rob’s Review of 12 Hour Shift

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