There are some strident cliches alongside redundant self-harming machismo in this sub-Schraderesque movie about New York paramedics, directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire and adapted from the novel by Shannon Burke. Sirens screaming and faces emoting, they battle through another dark-night-of-the-soul as they deal with gang shootings, domestic assaults, homeless people dying and crack addicts giving birth in hovels. They are often assigned the futile chore of attending to corpses discovered in decaying buildings, surrounded by black flies – but aren’t all the other patients just corpses in waiting? And so the black flies of horror start buzzing into their brains.
Tye Sheridan co-stars as Ollie, the standard-issue Hollywood rookie, a fresh-faced young ambulance guy from Colorado (of all the poignantly innocent places) paired in time-honoured style with a grizzled old-timer. This is the seen-it-all Gene Rutkovsky, appropriately nicknamed “Rut”, a veteran of a million horrors, including 9/11, played by Sean Penn. Fights break out among the guys back at the station house and Mike Tyson has a cameo as the grouchy chief who has to keep everyone in line.
Poor Ollie is terrified on his first day in the chaos, but the wryly amused Rut takes pity on him, looks out for him, and becomes his partner, a careworn Virgil to his Dante in the Big Apple inferno. Of course Ollie comes to adore Rut, but will he have to cover up for him? Ollie is a medical student, who is doing this job to pay the bills while he prepares to retake a medical exam, and of course there are no prizes for guessing if the horror of the job is going to seep into his soul, and whether he will then get through it to become a more compassionate and mature adult.
The obvious comparison is with Martin Scorsese’s paramedic drama Bringing Out the Dead from 1999, co-written by Paul Schrader, with Nicolas Cage as the emergency guy letting the job get to him, and Sheridan has already played a not dissimilar rookie figure opposite Oscar Isaac in Schrader’s gambling movie The Card Counter. But Black Flies is simply trading on old ideas. As for the female characters well, there do not appear to be any female paramedics in New York. There are female patients and Ollie has a girlfriend (Raquel Nave), with whom his relationship goes sour, and Rut has an ex-wife (Katherine Waterston) and a daughter on whom he dotes – but being a paramedic is in this film a stag party.
The movie has its moments, largely Ollie’s horrified realisation about an awful truth in the paramedic business; that there is an unacknowledged euthanasia aspect to the job, a secret world of letting no-hope cases die in the back of the ambulance to keep the whole business viable. But overall the vital signs of this film are not great.
• Black Flies screened at the Cannes film festival.
