What If We Kissed On The Operating Table is a short film that takes place in a mysterious facility where women with unspecified mental issues receive a violently invasive treatment that creates clone versions of themselves. These clones becomes the patients’ nurses and tend to their needs during their stay at the hospital while they recover from their treatment. This short is also a proof of concept for a feature that Mills is developing.
In the film, patients pain and suffering are literally consumed by a nurse, who then vomits them back into existence as a sentient sludge that grows into a clone of the patient. The patient recovers under the care of their doppelgänger. The clones become both balm and battleground, embodying the paradox of self-love, self-harm, and the strange relationship we have with our own suffering.
At its core, this film is about transformation, for better or worse. It’s about the brutality of self-examination and the paradox of healing when the self is fractured. In this film, Mills poses deeply personal questions about care, harm, and the inheritance of pain and make them visceral, embodied, and impossible to look away from.