In a seedy Arkansas hospital in the late 1990s, Mandy (Angela Bettis), a nurse and junky, is sick of her job and the people she works with. She’s about to work a double shift, but she’s got bigger business on her hands. She’s in the organ trafficking business with her erratic cousin-by-marriage Regina (Chloe Farnworth), who is about to pick up a kidney from her and bring it to the dealer. But the kidney somehow gets misplaced, meaning Mandy must find another organ source, or else she’s toast. During this same night, Mandy’s brother and a convicted killer are both hospitalized, and by the next morning, almost everyone has had a brush with disaster. 

Brea Grant’s second feature aims to be a sort of dark screwball comedy that has us on the edge of our seat for the outrageousness and gruesomeness of what might occur. Behavior is extreme, caricature is embraced—each character has at least one defining quirk. Yet almost no one has genuinely thoughtful or compassionate feelings for another, and friendships, if they exist, seem more like truces than displays of genuine affection.

We are intended, I think, to feel that the laughs act as a chaser for the hideous happenings, to enjoy the anything-goes craziness of this world, but it would be a stretch to say that the humor lands, as most of it is downright tasteless—one elderly dialysis patient, for instance, dies a grizzly death.

This reviewer also was not impressed by how the film embraces a grotesque stereotype, portraying Regina as stupid white trash. If the writer had dug farther beneath the surface of these characters, perhaps we would be more justified in laughing at some of their foibles. The movie, however, revels almost exclusively in their surfaces.

12 Hour Shift also loses impact because so much of the dialogue is repetitious, since characters are so often angry and exasperated. Though somewhat charming for her world weariness, Mandy is part of the problem. There seems to be so little that she is hoping for, other than to come out of this business unscathed or getting her next fix, that we as the audience have little to keep us engaged. 

There may be viewers out there who will be taken by its outlandishness. Many of us, though, will finish the film just as weary as Mandy.

12 Hour Shift was part of the lineup of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.