My quick rating – 4.7/10. Don’t let the date fool you, Rounding has been kicking around the festival circuit since 2022, only to quietly arrive for wider audiences in early 2025. Unfortunately, the years didn’t add polish. This film bills itself as a psychological horror-drama hybrid, but by the time anything resembling horror shows up—about fifteen minutes before the credits—it’s far too little, far too late.
The story follows a young medical resident (Namir Smallwood), driven but damaged, who relocates to a rural hospital in hopes of resetting his life. There, he becomes increasingly entangled in the case of a young girl with asthma, and gradually begins to unravel. Or at least, that’s the idea. What unfolds is a slow, vague descent into surrealism that never fully commits to being either a grounded psychological portrait or an effective horror film.
Rounding is stuffed with tiresome, jargon-heavy medical dialogue that may be technically accurate, at least to those of us without a medical background, but it quickly becomes exhausting. The emotional stakes get buried under a barrage of stethoscopes, symptom lists, and blank stares. Meanwhile, the horror elements that do finally show up feel stapled on, offering a few vaguely creepy (but ultimately unscary) visuals in an attempt to jolt some life into the dying narrative.
The structure is equally frustrating—an unorganized collage of disjointed imagery, unexplained turns, and developments that border on implausible. Characters behave in ways that defy logic, and motivations are either opaque or nonexistent. When the film finally delivers its “reveal,” it lands with a thud. There’s nothing shocking or satisfying about it, and one character even has to awkwardly spell it out just to make sure we are on the same page. That’s never a good sign.
To its credit, there are hints of deeper symbolism and biblical allegory, such as a certain seven-headed monster making an appearance. But the pacing is so sluggish and the storytelling so inert that digging into those layers hardly feels worth the effort. It’s the kind of film that rewards patience, but only if you’re willing to give far more than you get in return. I wasn’t, at least not for a second viewing, ever.
In the end, Rounding feels like a rough draft of something more compelling, lost between medical realism and psychological horror. It reaches for depth but never quite grabs hold. Instead, we’re left with a slow-moving, muddled narrative that explains itself too much and still doesn’t say enough. It could be a useful sleep aid, though.
There are a couple of streamers carrying this flick, including Amazon.