The new film Clean Hands gives audiences a glimpse into the real-life struggles of Brooke Simmers (Esther McGregor) and the fight against drug addiction she endured. Her father, Kevin (Zach Braff), was then inspired to create Brooke’s House in her honor. The cast also includes Abigail Spencer, Holt McCallany, and Lucas Till. Today, Collider is excited to share an exclusive sneak peek from the film ahead of its release in select theaters and on VOD on October 16.
Directed by Jake Allyn, Clean Hands tells the true story of Simmers’ struggle with addiction that led to her father creating a non-profit in her honor. Brooke’s House, based in Hagerstown, provides addicts with the help they need. The film is described as follows: “Based on an unbelievable true story, Sergeant Kevin Simmers (Braff) leads a task force waging war on drugs in Hagerstown, Maryland, a major stop on the ‘Heroin Highway.’ At home, he’s a desperate father grappling with his 19-year-old daughter Brooke’s (McGregor) escalating addiction from pain meds to heroin. As Kevin is forced to confront the failures of the system, he dedicates his life to defending, together, father and daughter fight for recovery, redemption, and hope.”
In our exclusive sneak peek, Kevin and Brooke are playing basketball with Dana (Spencer). It’s a nice family moment that results in Brooke winning $50 bucks from her dad. When he asks her to stay and watch the game, she declines and bikes away as a voice-over speaks. “I feel a hole in me; I’m not really sure why,” Brooke’s voice-over says. “Sometimes I feel like when the wind blows, it just blows right through me. And I don’t want to feel like that anymore.”
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
The Incredible Work ‘Clean Hands’ Is Doing
The film was made in partnership with the organization Brooke’s House that Simmers’ real-life father created in her honor. The organization is a non-profit, all-women recovery home. As part of their collaboration, there was an on-set work program that was created during the filming of Clean Hands to help women learn about the film industry and get jobs during the production. As part of the film’s ongoing mission to share Simmers’ story, a third of the profits from the film will be dedicated to the organization that has helped to save the lives of women struggling through addiction.
You can see McGregor and Braff star in Clean Hands, in theaters and on VOD on October 16. Watch our sneak peek above and stay tuned at Collider for more.
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