Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!
There’s something inherently disturbing to me about secret societies. Anything that is shrouded in that kind of deliberate mystery is something that gets my hackles up. Add in the idea of medical malfeasance and the exploration into the world of forbidden research, and you’ve got something that is almost certainly going to be something I find disturbing. That’s where we’re going with Anatomy (Anatomie in the original German). I often find medical things difficult to watch. Once I started this up, I knew it was going to be something of a rough ride for me.
Paula Henning (Franka Potente) is a medical student with a long pedigree—her father is a doctor and her grandfather had a long tenure as a medical professor. She is accepted to a prestigious summer course at the University of Heidelberg where her grandfather taught. On the train there, she saves the life of a young man named David (Arndt Schwering-Sohnrey), who claims to have a serious heart condition. A few days later, David shows up on one of the slabs in Paula’s class.
That’s essentially the starting point for Anatomie. Naturally, Paula is upset by seeing someone she knew, even fleetingly, on a dissecting table. She takes it upon herself to investigate how David died and how he wound up on the table in her class. She sneaks a tissue sample to a friend and also discovers a recent tattoo or brand on David’s ankle.
A little bit of investigative work turns up evidence of a secret medical society called the Anti-Hippocratic Society (which would be abbreviated with a triple-A in German). This society’s guiding principle is that the Hippocratic ideal of “do no harm” has serious drawbacks when it comes to advancing the medical profession and the discovery of new treatments and methods. In other words, this is a group that experiments on patients, sometimes vivisecting them when they feel that there is something to be learned from a condition they have. Or, sometimes they’ll happily vivisect someone if they feel like that person doesn’t really have a function in the world. And, as you might expect with a secret medical society with long historical roots in Germany, there’s a natural connection to the Nazis.
As Paula continues to investigate, a few of the people around her start to disappear, and others begin behaving in more and more suspicious ways. The deeper she digs, the more it seems that everyone around her is involved in the AAA, and the more she seems like she is in danger, even when it becomes clear that people very close to her may have been (or may still be) involved in the society.
Having now watched Anatomie, I think I may have pegged what bothers me about a lot of medical stuff in movies like this one. I’m not sure, but it’s the fact that the people involved are always dealing with these things in such a dispassionate manner. When the average person is bleeding out, they’re also freaking out, and so are the people around them. When it’s being perpetrated by someone with medical credentials, though, they tend to treat the body they are cutting into like it’s a steak. It’s the coldness that really troubles me—that there’s no real sense of emotion in not merely taking a life but torturing it out of someone.
And this is where we’ll be spending at least some of our time. Much of what this society does is create exhibits of human anatomy similar to the Body Works exhibitions of Dr. Gunther von Hagens. A part of what we see is some of the creation of those exhibits, and it is extremely unpleasant. But again, this is something that I find particularly upsetting—your mileage may vary on this.
I like Franke Potente, and that’s a big help when it comes to watching Anatomie. She’s someone who I find immediately sympathetic, and since she is going to spend a great deal of this movie under direct threat, that’s going to be important in keeping the interest of the audience.
What I did find interesting here is that we’re going to find out a lot of what feels like should be third act reveals a lot earlier. Moments that should come as shock revelations are instead revealed almost in casual conversation. It’s surprisingly effective, because it treats all of this like a sort of open secret, like something that everyone should have been aware of. It makes us feel like we’ve been naïve along with Paula. Rather than a big reveal, it’s more of an, “Oh, you didn’t know?”
This was better than expected. It’s disturbing, but it also hits on some of the things I specifically find disturbing, so take that into account.
Why to watch Anatomy: Secret society plots are cool.
Why not to watch: Medical stuff is nasty
