‍ WRITER’S NOTE

When you've derailed your own future before it's even begun, who stands beside you in the wreckage?

I have to tell you about Robert first, because he's the reason this film matters to me more than its thriller plot ever could. Robert is Dean's co-resident and closest friend, and he is also, quietly, a portrait of one of the two dearest friends I lost in 2014, the losses that first turned me toward writing. So when I built this story, I built Robert to last. He is the most loyal man in it, and I gave him the role I wish I could give my friend in life: the one who stays.

The film opens on the cruelest irony of Dean's life, the night he becomes a father. Out celebrating his son's birth with Robert, Dean wrecks Robert's father's car, is arrested for a DUI, and in a single night watches his plastic surgery residency come apart. In 1991 he's exiled to a remote charity clinic in Oaxaca, Mexico, leaving behind his newborn son and Sarah, his girlfriend and a doctor in training herself. There, adrift, he falls into a dangerous affair with Maria, the head nurse, married to Dr. Iglesias, the man who runs the place, and uncovers something monstrous beneath the charity: Iglesias harvesting organs from the patients no one is watching.

Through all of it, Robert is the thread. He follows Dean to Mexico. He works beside him. He is Dean's conscience — you have a family waiting for you in New York — and when it all detonates and Dean nearly dies for what he's uncovered, it's Robert who stands over the operating table with Dean's blood on his hands and refuses to let him go. The friend Dean wronged on the worst night of his life becomes the man who saves it.

This is the middle chapter of a story I've told across three films about Dean. It ends with a letter and a photograph of a pregnant woman among ancient ruins — a consequence he'll spend another whole film answering for. But at its heart it's about the people who stand beside us when we've wrecked everything, and don't leave. I couldn't keep my friend. So I did the only thing a writer can: I gave him a place where he never has to go.

— Leonard Tachmes, M.D.