Chilling true crime thriller carries social message
Apparently caring nurse killed patients
The Good Nurse (121 mins) (PG)
Now streaming on Netflix Directed by Tobias Lindholm Reviewed by Jen Shieff
How will he be stopped? Who will stop him? It doesn’t take long for this docu-drama about the serial killer, nurse Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne, 2015: The Danish Girl; 2016, 2018, 2022: Fantastic Beasts)
to creep up on you. It’s set mostly in the gloomy, uncanny quiet that descends on hospitals at night. The slow pace, the horrific moments and the hauntingly weird, motherobsessed main character bring Psycho (1960) to mind.
How Charles Cullen killed an estimated 400 patients in nine healthcare facilities is revealed in the film, and it’s a cautionary tale about hospital behaviour. Hospital risk managers everywhere have to be aware of potentially disastrous lawsuits that could bring them to their knees financially.
It’s a story about medical ethics and it’s also a story about the overload being experienced by frontline nurses. On top of the knowledge nurses have to acquire and apply, they have to be strong, physically, mentally and emotionally, while managing punishingly long hours, lonely night shifts, keeping themselves fed, their charts up to date and being ready when a patient is coding, to use the language of Tobias Lindholm’s brilliantly conceived film.
Lindholm is better known for screenwriting than directing, but after this, he will probably be able to choose. In The Good Nurse ,he captures the same sort of complex mood of Another Round (2020) on which he collaborated as screenwriter with director Thomas Vinterburg, to create a memorable mixture of unruliness and grief.
In Another Round it was Mads Mikkelsen who breathed life into his character, grieving, often drunk, Martin. In The Good Nurse, Eddie Redmayne plays a similarly complex role: he’s apparently kind and caring, compassionate, with a sparkle of what appears to be empathy in his eyes, and all the while he’s giving random people lethal doses of insulin.
Nobody knows why he did it, except there’s a line, well positioned by screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (2021, Last Night in Soho), that’s laden with possibility: Charles Cullen simply says, “Nobody stopped me.”
A nurse colleague of Charles Cullen, Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain, 2017: Molly’s Game, 2021: TV series Scenes From A Marriage), has cardiomyopathy, a condition she has to keep secret, except that she confides in personable Charles. He knows that, until she’s been on the job for a full year, if she faints or can’t turn an obese patient, she’ll likely to be sacked and lose her health benefits. Amy needs a heart transplant with an eye-watering cost attached to it. What will happen to her two small daughters, who she is raising alone, if she can’t afford surgery? Charles wants to help.
Despite their friendship, her entanglement with him, Amy knows she has to betray Charles when she connects the dots that lead to him. With almost no hesitation, she heroically gathers evidence and collaborates with the police.
There’s seat-gripping dramatic tension, wonderful acting and a powerful, almost unbelievable story. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.
Highly recommended.
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