Madcap and morbidly hilarious, writer-director Brea Grant’s 12 Hour Shift is a brilliant study in chaotic absurdity. Mandy (Angela Bettis) is an ER nurse who spends most of her time on the clock snorting medication in the storage room, offering withering smiles to annoying patients, and hastening the demise of lost causes for her side hustle: the black market organ trade. When her dubious cousin Regina (Chloe Farnworth) loses a kidney that she was supposed to transport for Mandy, all hell breaks loose as they scramble to locate a replacement organ for the demanding trafficker who will hunt the women down if they don’t come up with another by the end of Mandy’s shift.
Bettis is phenomenal as Mandy, imbuing her with a fascinating mixture of weary intelligence, deadpan humor, and the twitchy mannerisms of an addict. Her atrophied conscience flares up in fits and starts as the bodies begin to pile up around her. She and Regina are working at cross-purposes, with Regina murdering and harvesting at random and Mandy attempting to be more systematic in her quest to procure a kidney. As bag after bag of valuable organs go missing in a gag with an immensely satisfying payoff, a menacing prisoner (David Arquette) shows up to complicate matters even further. The pacing is superb: Grant does an incredible job of maintaining the screwball energy as Mandy and Regina do their best to evade the bumbling cops who descend on the hospital to figure out what in the hell is happening.
Matt Glass’s remarkable score underlines the bloody wackiness and the deceptively low-stakes feeling of the film’s absurd comedy. Darkly bombastic music cues accompany Mandy as she jogs haphazardly from room to room to put out the various fires that Regina starts. (They’re metaphorical fires, but Regina is such a devoted agent of chaos that it would be a shock to find out that she doesn’t have any arson in her past.) The tone is sublime: no one in the film seems to realize or care much about the moral implications of the increasing stack of corpses; they seem much more worried about whether the increased police scrutiny will force them to shut down their operation for a few weeks and how terrible the cake in the break room tastes.
The film is set in Arkansas in 1999, and Grant adds authentic touches that are charming and hilarious in their specificity. A co-worker tells Mandy she must be rich because of her fancy Candie’s shoes. A wall in the hospital sports a print of those cherubs from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna that were ubiquitous in the late ‘90s. Newscasters discuss the Y2K crisis, the Beanie Babies craze, and the unpredictability of Arkansas weather. It all adds up to a very lived-in film experience where the off-kilter plot comes down to earth just enough to feel like something you would have heard about from your sister’s boyfriend’s cousin who lives just a couple of towns over from the hospital where it all went down.
When the newscasters relay the story of the hospital massacre at the end of the film and report the body count, you can’t help but ask yourself, “Is that all?” Filmed on location in Jonesboro, Arkansas, it feels like about half of the city’s population of 77,000 should be dead after the havoc that Mandy and Regina wreak. Thrilling and hilarious, 12 Hour Shift is a marvel of gallows humor that takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through half a day in the life of a group of captivating, desperate people who make increasingly terrible decisions.
