The
 Vincent
PEREZ
Archives

USA
2009
100 minutes

Synopsis: Every day, rising L.A. District Attorney Paul Chaney and his wife, Diane, wait for word that there's a donor for their daughter, Chloe. Diagnosed with a rare degenerative condition, Chloe is on a long list to receive a rare double lung transplant. As her health worsens, Paul becomes desperate to save his young child, so desperate that he'll risk everything he has to organize an operation. When Paul learns of a Dr. Placer who performs transplants in Tijuana, Mexico, he heads south in a frantic search for the only man who may be able to save Chloe. But after arriving, he realizes Dr. Placer's medical ring runs deep into a criminal underworld where his patients aren't donors, they're victims. With his career, his family, and his life on the line, Paul finds himself at a critical crossroads: expose a massive, illegal harvesting operation and save the lives of hundreds of children, or save the life of his daughter.

Production Notes:
Originally titled "Run for her Life". Shot in New Mexico during the summer of 2008.

November 2009:
Echo Bridge Entertainment has picked up international rights from 26 Films to Baltasar Kormakur's new Engish-language thriller and will commence pre-sales this week at the American Film Market.  John Claflin worked on Christian Escario's early draft of the screenplay. Los Angeles-based 26 Films' Michelle Chydzik Sowa and Nathalie Marciano produced the film and retain domestic rights in anticipation of a 2009 release. "'Inhale' features all the key elements of a box office success,'" Echo Bridge's executive vice president Dan March said. "It's a fast-paced thriller genre with stellar A-List cast and production team and a critically acclaimed, up-and-coming director - the style of the film will definitely appeal to a broad audience of movie fans."

Reviews:

Joe Neumaier, NY Daily News:
As a tale of parental desperation and the cost of conscience, "Inhale" comes from a thought-provoking place.

Gary Goldstein, LA Times:
It takes a while to get there, but "Inhale" eventually emerges as a tense and morally complex thriller with a devastating twist.

David Noh, Film Journal:
The unusually strong supporting cast— Shepard, David Selby as another Santa Fe bigwig, Rosanna Arquette as a sympathetic doctor, Jordi Molla as a Juarez police chief and, especially, Vincent Perez as an enigmatic medico—adds texture.

Rex Reed:
Soberly and responsibly, a small but significant film called Inhale, starring the underrated, charismatic and terrifically accomplished Dermot Mulroney, has arrived without fanfare or big-budget ad campaigns to capture some well-deserved attention. It tackles the growing horror of organ tourism–the search for illegal alternatives to long waiting lists for organ transplants that never happen. According to this eye-opening dossier on the subject, 15,000 sick people each year fall victim to organ trafficking by organized crime. These surgeries are often performed under the eye of local and national governments, health ministries and professional medical associations, without the donor’s consent. You will go away with your heart full and your eyes wide open.

Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter:
"Inhale" is a well-written, shrewdly produced thriller, but the audience for the film might be limited by the uncomfortable subject matter of illegal organ harvesting.

Stephen Holden, NY Times:
“Inhale" is a shrill, feverish melodrama about illicit organ trafficking... Filmed in a semi-documentary style, it fitfully aspires to moral seriousness. It wants to be accepted as an exposé of a criminal enterprise to which governments often turn a blind eye and as a “Babel”-like critique of entitled Americans abroad who think their money can buy anything. At the same time “Inhale” is a creepy medical thriller in the tradition of “Coma”.

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal:
The director, Baltasar Kormákur, has a great gift for working with actors, and a good cast to work with: Dermot Mulroney as Paul, the father of a child whose lungs are failing; Diane Kruger as her mother, Diane; Jordi Mollà and Vincent Perez as Mexicans of questionable probity... "Inhale" works not only both sides of the border but both sides of the street, deploring the practices of an illegal organ ring while exploiting its existence. You keep rooting for the child to get a new pair of lungs, but all of the beatings, betrayals and bitter ironies leave a bad taste in your head.

Harvey Karten, NY film critic:
“Inhale” is that rare crime thriller that raises moral questions, questions that Paul and Diane have to sift through in making decisions about their daughter’s treatment. When Paul discovers that the organs he seeks and for which he is willing to pay will cost him big but, more important will involve a moral choice—one that would put his daughter’s life in the balance—we in the audience will likely ponder what we would do if we were put into the same situation... Dermot Mulroney receives able assistance from a cast of Spanish-speaking Americans photographed wholly within the state of New Mexico by Ottar Gudnason, the sharp dialogue penned by Walter Doty and John Clafin from a story by Christian Escario. The film is grainy, presumably to give the feeling of a documentary shot with hidden cameras.

Michelle Orange, Movieline:
The intersection of morals and ethics opened up by medical advances is a rich subject, as are the attendant, ironic pressures those advances put on something more scarce than healthy kidneys: spiritual fortitude... Paul [Mulroney] grows a conscience only when he has his nose rubbed in the consequences of his pursuit, and he's eager to believe whatever the jaded but possibly morally sound foreign "Doctors Without Nations" volunteer (Vincent Perez) tells him. "We live in a war zone down here," he says. "What is wrong with using dead people to save other lives?" It's a provocative question; equally interesting is the invocation of the law of presumed consent, which privileges a sort of moral logic over individual rights.

Ella Taylor, NPR:
A new thriller set in the international organ trafficking underworld puts a hair-raising topical spin on a hoary old Hollywood question: How far would you go to save the life of your child? Serviceably scripted by Walter Doty and John Claflin from a story by Christian Escario, this nested-doll thriller is efficiently directed by Icelandic actor-filmmaker Baltazar Kormakur, who keeps us unsettled by adding freshly ambiguous new motivations for players whose characters we thought we'd nailed.