DANCES WITH FILMS 2026 REVIEW! Some battles find you whether you’re looking for one or not. In Doug Bremner’s The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, that battle belongs to a university psychiatrist who gets pulled into a fight against one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies — one determined to protect a billion-dollar acne drug with dark side effects.
In a story inspired by true events, Dr. Jack Forteo (Andy Evans) is a respected brain scientist and psychiatrist who is one day approached by a New Jersey nurse, Amanda Bellaconda (Hannah Fierman), who traveled a great distance in hopes of an impromptu meeting with Dr. Forteo. She believes her teenage son, Jacob (Cade Gass), killed himself as a result of using a revolutionary acne medicine, Carinaderm, made by the Renzon Pharmaceutical Company.
She thinks that Jack’s expertise in brain imaging and depression can prove that Carinaderm is behind an epidemic of teen suicide. Sympathetic but skeptical, Jack doubts that kind of research would ever get funded. They find a workaround: Amanda raises the money — as a donation to the university — from other bereaved parents who lost children to Carinaderm. Jack is still unsure because Renzon is one of the university’s largest donors, and he does not want to be involved in any legal proceedings. Pressure comes from the other direction when Amanda’s Texas attorney, Red Leghorn (David de Vries), and his co-counsel, Ryan Singh (Shaan Sharma), fly in to make the final case on behalf of grieving families.
Jack agrees to the test, scanning Carinaderm patients’ brains and interviewing them one by one. His research reveals that the medicine affects the brain’s frontal lobe, which regulates emotion. As the results confirm everything Amanda believes about the side effects of the drug, pressure to discontinue the research or get Jack fired starts to mount. He is being attacked both publicly and privately, and it’s beginning to take its toll on his family and his mental health.
“She believes her teenage son…killed himself as a result of using a revolutionary acne medicine, Carinaderm, made by the Renzon Pharmaceutical Company.”
Writer, director, and producer Doug Bremner didn’t have to look far for the story behind The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg. A practicing psychiatrist and professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Bremner conducted a brain imaging study on acne patients treated with Accutane. The results are dramatized in this film. The billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry, as he quickly learned, did not take kindly to any threat, large or small, against their “golden eggs.” Bremner had been quietly writing books and screenplays about his experience for fifteen years before the cameras rolled. When it came time to make the movie, he kept it local, drawing on Atlanta’s large pool of talent, and he is finally getting his story out to the public.
The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg is, at its core, a biographical drama, as it simply lays out the facts and the human emotions behind the story’s events. Jack is the through line, following his journey from a reluctant university researcher to a consumer liability advocate. That said, this is a decidedly low-budget indie. Don’t walk in expecting an expensive John Grisham adaptation. What you get instead is a modest production that profiles a courageous man and walks you through the events of a court case. The “seedy backroom” scenes, where Renzon’s lawyers and executives scheme against Jack, provide exceptional villainous moments.
Andy Evans carries the film’s emotional weight as Dr. Jack, showing us what this fight ultimately costs Jack professionally and personally. He misses his daughter’s school play. His wife suspects his relationship with Amanda is becoming something more. He’s a man getting squeezed from every direction, and Evans bears that weight without overplaying it. It’s also hard not to get pulled into the larger story of parents who lost their children, the billion-dollar machine trying to sweep it under the rug.
Stories like this are precisely the whole point of independent film: they go where the studios won’t, since the studios are often sponsored by these big pharmaceutical companies. And whatever its budget limitations, The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg feels authentic from start to finish. The locations and sets work. The story is real. That counts for a lot.
The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg screened at the 2026 Dances with Films.
"…Some battles find you whether you're looking for one or not."
