What If We Kissed on the Operating Table
What If We Kissed on the Operating Table is a surreal body horror short film written and directed by Sydney Mills. Blending body horror, psychological thriller, mystery, and science fiction with influences from contemporary art and experimental filmmaking.
What If We Kissed on the Operating Table takes place in a women-only hospital that offers a treatment to remove one's mental anguish. The treatment is violent, surreal, and transformative. Patients are partially consumed by a nurse, who then vomits them back into existence as a sentient sludge that grows into their clone. The patient recovers under the care of this doppelgänger, whose treatment mirrors the way she treats herself in daily life. The clones become both balm and battleground, embodying the paradox of self-love and self-harm.
These clones also externalize a quieter form of violence: the internalized misogyny so many women absorb over the course of their lives. We learn to monitor ourselves, punish ourselves, diminish ourselves, and mistake that cruelty for discipline, resilience, or even care. In the hospital, those impulses are no longer internal. They become flesh.
At its core, this film is about transformation, for better or worse. It is about the brutality of self-examination and the paradox of healing when the self is fractured. What If We Kissed on the Operating Table asks whether it is possible to care for ourselves without reproducing the same patterns of cruelty we inherited from others. It poses deeply personal questions about care, harm, womanhood, and the inheritance of pain, making them visceral, embodied, and impossible to look away from.
After self-funding much of the production, Mills successfully raised more than $15,000 through a Seed&Spark crowdfunding campaign to complete post-production and prepare the film for festivals.
The film is currently being submitted to film festivals around the world while the team completes a full theatrical sound redesign. The new mix is scheduled for completion in late August, ensuring audiences will experience the film as it was intended: on the big screen with an immersive cinematic soundscape.