"Megan Follows At Her Best"
Alex Strachan

Open Heart is one of those rote, pedestrian issue-of-the-week movies that TV cranks out with wearying regularity, but this film has one important factor in its favour that most others don't: a sensational performance at its core that is anything but indifferent.

Megan Follows practically immerses herself in the role of a dedicated but overworked scrub nurse at a pediatric heart unit in a regional hospital, somewhere in Canada's Atlantic provinces.

Follows is anything but glamourous in the part of a workaholic who is slowly losing a battle with the bottle; her skin has the pale, mottled look of someone who has worked too many 18-hour days under fluorescent lights, and her eyes have taken on the dazed, half- dead quality of someone who has been beaten down too often.

The film opens with her mentor, a respected heart surgeon, leaving the underfunded hospital for greener pastures. His replacement is a cowboy, a confidant, smooth-talking charmer (Train 48's Raoul Bhaneja) who rides in on his white charger and immediately makes a hash out of everything he touches.

He's an arrogant incompetent, and after five out of six babies die on his operating table, Follows' character is at her wits' end about what to do about it. The hospital administration stonewalls her at every turn, other doctors don't want to turn on one of their own, her fellow nurses refuse to back her up and her former mentor cautions her against turning to the media.

I haven't given much away -- you can guess the ending on your own -- because virtually every scene in Open Heart is predictable. It's been done countless times before, and yet Follows is reason alone to watch. This is one of the bravest, most searing performances in a made-for-TV movie in a long while, and there are moments so heartfelt, as when a small girl, placed in her care, gently kisses her on the cheek, that they're practically heartbreaking.

Never mind glossy trash like ER. If you want genuine insight into the working life of a scrub nurse on medicine's front lines, watch Follows in Open Heart instead.