But The Bleeding Edge exists to stoke outrage, and on this front, it succeeds.
The Bleeding Edge is nothing new in form, no different from countless other effortlessly well-made, issue-based documentaries. The closest the movie gets to prescription is a list of helpful “Safety Precautions” it runs before the credits roll. Although one of the final scenes sees several of the women affected by Essure travel to Capitol Hill and speak with representatives, the movie doesn’t deal with the question of what disrupting the FDA might look like.Īsking a movie to prove the existence of a problem and to think about solving it is no small feat, but it’s a problem The Bleeding Edge lays out for itself. If The Bleeding Edge succeeds in diagnosing the problem, it rather ignores the necessity of finding a path forward. Hammering home the very plain point that the unregulated medical device industry is a massive cog in our health care mess is the movie’s goal. While interviews with experts provide crucial context, Dick and his creative team are more interested in the on-the-ground realities of policy. The movie does well to avoid jargon at all costs, only occasionally diving deep into the facts of poor regulation.
Those scenes of solidarity, of trust between people who know they’re not alone, are the movie’s antidote to the depression of getting to know the profit-churning medical device industry. A Facebook group for women who suffered health effects as a result of the device grew stronger over the course of years, eventually leading to an in-person summit. The survivors of Essure offer the movie’s only hopeful moments. Even devices like Essure, which went through the Pre-Market Approval process to which not all technologies are subject, get shortchanged in clinical studies, allowing companies to put out devices without the full knowledge of long-term effects. Essure, a permanent form of birth control inserted into the fallopian tubes, is the movie’s main case study.įor the women spotlighted in the film, Essure has caused myriad medical problems, from bleeding to tubal perforations. The devastations of lax regulations and profit-chasing are obvious: poor medical devices ruin lives. The Bleeding Edge follows the ease with which medical device companies get their products on the market, saving little time for serious clinical testing. His issue-driven documentaries follow the proven formula of exploring a grand problem by way of a variety of first-person confessionals. The ongoing horrors of the medical device industry are on full display in The Bleeding Edge, the latest original documentary produced by Netflix.įor fans of outrage filmmaking, The Bleeding Edge hits the mark. The challenge director Kirby Dick takes on is to overcome the banality of weak industry regulations with the countless stories of trauma that are its after-effect.ĭick has a strong track record, most notably the anti-MPAA manifesto This Film Is Not Yet Rated.