
What If We Kissed On The Operating Table

What If We Kissed On The Operating Table (Trailer)

What If We Kissed On The Operating Table - Seed&Spark Campaign Video
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 Sydney is developing with her long time friend and Co-Producer Nikole Zivalich.
Sydney first had the idea for What If We Kissed On The Operating Table two and a half years ago. She was in the midst of a very long creative block and in a dark place personally. She wanted to make something so badly, but was so depressed and anxious that she couldn’t bring herself to create —which, of course, only made the depression and anxiety worse.
One night over a couple beers, Sydney blurted out to her husband Casey Baker, “I wish I could surgically remove my ambition. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad all the time for not making anything.” That got her thinking. She didn't want to get rid of her ambition—she wanted to get rid of what was stopping her from creating.
Wouldn’t it be incredible if there were a place you could go to have all your darkness sucked out of you forever?
The team has seen a lot of sci-fi television, so they know how ideas like that are destined to go horribly wrong. Sydney became less interested in the idea of psychic pain being removed, and more interested in the process itself—how the removal would be represented, and what happens to that pain afterward.
In What If We Kissed On The Operating Table, a patients’ pain is reverse-transmogrified into a clone version of themselves. This clone becomes the patients’ nurse and tends to their needs during their stay at the hospital while they recover from their "operation." And the way a patient treats their clone reflects the way they treat themselves in their daily lives outside of the hospital. For example, someone who normally engages in a lot of self-soothing may need their clone to nurture them, while someone with a penchant for self-harm may ridicule and even torture their clone. In this film, the doppelgänger nurses serve as both balm and battlegrounds for their ailing and needy sires.
While this is a fantastical, at times surrealist, horror film (think the trippy parts of Cosmatos' Mandy, Cronenberg's Videodrome, Russel's Altered States), this is an incredibly personal project.
Sydney Mills is an only child, and she often imagined how nice it would be to have a twin. Sydney thought about her imaginary twin in two ways. In one version, she’s a sister who supports her—a shoulder to cry on, someone to share things in common with, enjoy spending time with, and who helps carry the burden of caring for family. In other moments, she’s an emissary. She does what Sydney needs her to do. She carries all the burdens Sydney was never wanted to bear, and she does so alone—just as Sydney once did.
Now more than ever, its important to think about stories of self-reflection. Though as a society we’ve become more comfortable speaking about personal struggles and mental health issues, we focus heavily on coping and management and very little about the fundamentals of who we are and how we became that way. This film is a meditation on how we externalize pain, and whether it's truly possible to heal when the self is fractured.
At its core, What If We Kissed On The Operating Table’s central theme is transformation, both physical and psychological, for better or for worse. The patients at this facility choose a brutal and visceral procedure in the pursuit of change, self-care, and betterment. Nurses are tasked with creating clones of their patients through a violent ritual that is both unsettling and deeply symbolic.
What If We Kissed On The Operating Table s a meditation on the human psyche's labyrinthine nature, depicting the paradoxes of self-love and the struggle to externalize or internalize care. It merges dreamlike aesthetics, emotional realism and horror to evoke both discomfort and catharsis.
This film is not about answers but about possibilities—an exploration of the "what ifs" that haunt our most vulnerable moments. It asks: If we could create a version of ourselves to take care of us, would we embrace them as a comrade, or would they become our undoing?













