Director: Christine Jeffs
A career built on precision starts to crack the moment someone else is watching the numbers. "A Mistake" follows a respected surgeon whose professional world tightens around her just as a new public reporting scheme puts every outcome under a microscope.
What is A Mistake about?
Elizabeth Banks plays a veteran surgeon whose steady hand and confident bedside manner have carried her through years of high-stakes work. When hospital administrators introduce a program that publishes individual surgeons' success and complication rates for anyone to see, a single difficult case becomes the thread that unravels her standing. Colleagues who once trusted her judgment start keeping their distance, wary of being associated with anything that might look bad on paper. The pressure doesn't stay contained to the operating room: her partner, who works at the same hospital as a nurse, begins pulling away too, unsettled by whispers and second-guessing that spread faster than facts. Adapted from Carl Shuker's novel, the film treats the hospital less as a backdrop and more as its own small society, one governed by reputation, liability, and the fear of being singled out. As the surgeon fights to hold on to her career and her sense of self, the story asks an uncomfortable question about modern accountability: what happens to trust and expertise when every decision is reduced to a public scorecard.
Cast & crew
Elizabeth Banks anchors the film with a controlled, interior performance, playing a woman who has to keep functioning under scrutiny without letting the cracks show. Simon McBurney and Mickey Sumner round out a cast built around hospital politics rather than courtroom fireworks, while New Zealand actor Rena Owen adds weight to the film's supporting bench.
Context & significance
Director Christine Jeffs, known for character-driven dramas, shot the film in New Zealand, giving it a specific institutional texture rather than a generic hospital setting. The story draws on real debates in medicine about publishing individual surgical outcomes, a practice meant to protect patients that can also flatten the complexity of skilled, high-risk work into a single public number.
Where & how to watch
"A Mistake" streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so viewers can follow the hospital drama's dialogue-heavy scenes in Farsi. The film's page is free to read without an account; watching it requires signing in with a free K-Time login, part of a Farsi-first viewing experience built for Persian-speaking audiences wherever they are.