M.R.I. (or, Michael Returns Indefinitely)

“Oh, that’s a dirty little secret of the healthcare industry. Sometimes we add extra tests”, is not just a line in my new film, “M.R.I. (or, Michael Returns Indefinitely)”. It’s also something a doctor actually said to me, while I was trying to get to the bottom of a health issue involving severe abdominal pains that came on suddenly in 2019.

I sat in the exam room, mouth agape, astonished that a doctor would openly admit something like this. I asked if the extra test would mean that my MRI exam would take longer. “Probably.” I firmly told her that I only wanted the tests that were actually necessary.

So I got an MRI. Then a CT scan. Then an Ultrasound. Then another MRI. And on and on. Along the way, I took note of a number of strange occurrences that stuck with me.

I couldn’t get to one MRI appointment because the streets were blocked off, and when I walked up to the building, there was a car overturned in the intersection right outside the clinic. At another appointment, a man named Michael took me to the changing room and said he’d be right back to get me, and then another man named Michael, who looked very similar, showed up to take me to the exam room. As I entered one MRI machine, I saw a little warning label that said “Do Not Look Directly At the Light”…right next to a little laser light that was pointed directly at my eye. Where was I supposed to look?! These are just a few of the weird things that imprinted in my memory, before finding their way into my film.

Then there’s the MRI exam itself. There’s nothing quite like the experience of getting an MRI. You’re strapped down and loaded into an incredibly claustrophobic tube and then given commands from an unseen technician. When the actual test cranks up, the SOUND of the machine is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. It sounds otherworldly, like something out of a science fiction movie.

Which is probably why I felt like the experience was fertile ground to make a darkly comedic sci-fi thriller about what it feels like to get sucked into the American healthcare system. How you have to be your own advocate and make sure nothing slips through the cracks. And even then, it can feel like you’re stuck in an endless cycle, in a system with motivations that don’t always seem to align with your own.

With this film, I wanted to take the audience inside that system. If you’ve never had an MRI, I wanted to show you what it feels like and sounds like to be inside that machine. And if you have had an MRI, to remind you how unsettling that experience can be. I wanted the audience to experience that rollover crash with me, and what it might have been like to be inside that car I saw, overturned in front of the medical building that afternoon.

I still have the photograph I took of the car before I went inside for that MRI exam. I feel like it’s been daring me all these years to push myself as a filmmaker into some uncharted creative terrain. And I hope that the end result is a piece that entertains as it spotlights an American healthcare system awash in dysfunction.

- John F. Beach