“Relationship To Patient” navigates physical and emotional discomfort with refreshing candor and humor

Caroline Creaghead’s compelling narrative short film makes its local premiere at the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 6.

The superbly executed 13-minute short film Relationship To Patient (2024)—making its Wisconsin premiere in the 2025 Wisconsin Film Festival’s “Wisconsin’s Own Short Stories” program on Sunday, April 6, at 6:30 p.m. at the Bartell Theatre—opens with Claudia (Eleanore Pienta) arriving at a hospital to sign in for a patient visit. Right from the opening lines, writer-director Caroline Creaghead efficiently nails down so many things about this world and the people in it.

Claudia’s awkward attempt at humor with the desk attendant—”Do you guys do punch cards?”—feels like both a natural reaction to an uncomfortable situation and a clear indication of her innate character. The medical receptionist—whose officious responses don’t even acknowledge Claudia’s joke attempt—is a synecdoche for the American healthcare experience: rigid to the point of being not just unhelpful but actually distressing in its impersonality. This whole scene is barely a minute long, but it manages to convey more than most shorts do in their entire runtimes—about Claudia, about the way people navigate difficult situations, and about the tragic state of and our relationship to a compromised healthcare system.

For the film’s next few minutes, Claudia tries, without success, to locate the patient she’s visiting in the surgery wing. It’s a sequence punctuated by further frustration and humor, the latter of which grounds the story in a kind of relatable reality while also letting viewers breathe during what is clearly a time of stress. As Creaghead noted in a recent phone conversation with Tone Madison: humor “is such a balm and a saving grace for us as people experiencing sometimes an unbearable experience. We don’t have to always feel terrible in terrible situations. There’s space for both, there’s space for all of it.”

When Claudia finally does track down the man she’s come to visit, Adrian (H. Jon Benjamin), it’s only after yet another awkward interaction, this time with a nurse who has unwittingly forced Claudia to come to terms with how she and Adrian have defined their relationship—or, more accurately, how they have not defined it. If the first half of the film navigates the physical labyrinth of a hospital, the latter half is about maneuvering the uncomfortable realities of hitching yourself to another person. Just about any of us who’ve ever sought companionship or a partner have experienced some form of Claudia’s tentativeness, and the honesty and accuracy with which Pienta conveys these complicated feelings is superb.

Relationship To Patient features a balanced mix of gripping dialogue, camera direction, and editing, but Pienta’s acting is what ties it all together so convincingly. As Creaghead also said: “I knew that Eleanore [Pienta] could pull [that] off, and I think that she did really beautifully. So much of her experience is on her face and not said or stated or acknowledged in a verbal way.” The subtleties of Pienta’s performance are aided by Creaghead and cinematographer Patrick Ouziel’s visual style of well-crafted naturalism: shots in a wider “scope” ratio manage to feel intentional without being overly staged or stylized.

Part of what makes Relationship To Patient feel so special is its pairing of an ordinary conversation (“What are we?”) with a heightened state of affairs in a setting often considered distinct from “ordinary” life. The subtle absurdity in bringing up a potentially fraught question like this with someone recovering from a major medical procedure ultimately registers as refreshingly honest. When else do important things come up if not during moments of crisis? A less original film would have focused on Adrian’s struggle and the challenges of the illness, but Creaghead is confident enough to direct our attention elsewhere—in particular, to the small but crucial moments between people on either side of the hospital experience. We as viewers are well rewarded by her efforts. The result is a nuanced, darkly comic portrait of companionship and two people forced to confront the things that we’d often prefer to leave unspoken.