A Case of Eggs: Episode 2
1974 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Bernard Devlin
Genres: mystery, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, tense
Patients vanish from St. Mary's Hospital as Frances follows a flower-carrying doctor to a farm laboratory. Secrets emerge and an alliance forms with the scientist.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1974 Canadian mystery that treats sci-fi intrigue like a bureaucratic horror—vanishing patients, a flower-carrying doctor, a secret farm lab—with the kind of deadpan restraint that makes most genre films look hysterical. It's the kind of film everyone else would call 'oddly paced' and miss entirely, which is exactly why it works.
Devlin's Episode 2 sits in productive tension between post-war thriller craft and experimental narrative structure, its contemplative rhythm and fragmented reveal-pattern echoing the formal lineage of European television cinema while resisting the American plot machinery entirely.
The entire film pivots on a single choice—the decision to follow the doctor through ordinary space rather than cut to exposition—which transforms what could've been a conventional mystery into something genuinely uncanny and intimate; watching someone *walk toward* the secret rather than being *told* about it changes everything.