Elizabeth Banks plays a New Zealand surgeon whose life is turned upside down after making a flawed decision during a routine surgery in “A Mistake.” The film opens in theaters on Friday, September 20.

Elizabeth Taylor (an awkward character name because of the movie star reference) is a highly experienced surgeon on night shift at a hospital in Auckland. A young woman complaining of stomach cramps undergoes a laparoscopic procedure led by Taylor. She instructs her registrar (in the U.S. he would be called a “resident”) Richard to insert the third and final trocar (an instrument used to drain fluid from a body cavity). He uses too much force and the patient’s life becomes endangered. Though the doctors manage to complete the operation and tell the woman’s parents she will be fine, she dies a few hours later.

Unfortunately for Taylor, the hospital has just adopted a new plan to make all surgical outcomes public–more transparency. She initially chooses to take the blame for the trocar mishap during a hearing and her first mistake is compounded by a series of bad judgements which lead to disastrous results: her career is threatened, her love life is destroyed (she was involved with a nurse who was present at the operation), she loses a friend’s dog she was caring for–it gets worse and worse. 

Banks is known mostly for her great comic performances but she gives a solid dramatic turn here, with an very genuine New Zealand accent and an excellent representation of what it takes to be a surgeon. The role calls for her to gradually learn painful lessons about her reliance on her intellectual strength and her inability to let others share responsibility when things go wrong–she renders all of this believably and with great compassion and nuance.

Director Christine Jeffs (“Sunshine Cleaning”) does an outstanding job of adding both subtlety and suspense to a story that could have easily devolved into just another medical melodrama. (She also wrote the script, adapting a celebrated novel by Carl Shuker.) All of the movie’s technical aspects are top-notch and the operation sequence is scarily realistic–prosthetic torsos were used. Standouts from the cast include Mickey Sumner (so memorable in “Frances Ha”) as Robin, a nurse romantically involved with Taylor and Richard Crouchley as the traumatized registrar.