Pathology is a medical thriller about a group of deranged pathology medical students. Our main character, Dr. Ted Grey (Milo Ventimiglia), is just starting his internship at a prestigious program. We don’t know much about him except that he is a hot shot with a giant stick up his butt that left his fiancé in another city. He is instantly despised by the other students because of his brilliance. His brilliance is also what gets him inducted into a weird after hours game. It reminded me slightly of “Fight Club” but killer style. Each group member murders someone in an undetectable fashion and the other group members must figure out the cause of death. The game leads to plenty of drugs, alcohol and sex.
Reading the synopsis, I was really interested in seeing this movie. Sadly, I think this movie fell short of what it could have been. We never got introduced to the characters, which is a pet peeve of mine. The only character we get to learn about is Dr. Gallo (Michael Weston). His character was shown as too crazy too early to capture the audience. He wants to be better than Dr. Ted Grey so the two spend most of the movie trading verbal jabs and unfortunately this becomes the focus of the movie instead of the game. The other members of the group are shown in snippets, but we never get to know them at all except for Juliette Bath (Lauren Lee Smith) who plays a feisty, sex obsessed member.
I would have liked to see them focus more on the game. We get to see the bodies afterwards, and the cadavers & effects are incredible, but there is little focus on how they got that way. How did the members choose their victims? How did the murder play out? I would have liked to have seen the plan and execution of the crimes because it would have helped us get to know the characters and helped the flow of the movie overall.
Pathology is edgy, but it has severely unfocused direction, and scenes clash into each other without any rhyme or reason. Following a group of homicidal pathology medical students that turn their work into a game should have been pure entertainment for horror fans, but the movie was lacking. The overall feeling of the movie was too somber and too focused on the trashiness of the group rather than their intelligence.
