Score: 4 / 5
Without having any knowledge of what I was seeing, I clicked on this recent Netflix release purely because of its leads. Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne starring together? Yes please, and I don't much care what happens! But Tobias Lindholm's The Good Nurse is in fact more than the sum of its main characters, and it's got a lot on its mind to boot.
Amy is a nurse in New Jersey, working night shift in the ICU. She's also a single mother without health insurance until she completes four more months working at her job. This is a problem when we're told that she suffers a serious heart condition that forces her to occasionally disappear to a private room to get her bearings and breathing back under control. The condition is life-threatening, and her high-stress job is doing nothing to help; she has to keep it secret, or it could be grounds for her termination from work. It's a pretty awful system if her employer, a hospital, would fire her on medical grounds and additionally wouldn't help her anyway. Chastain, ever the radiant feminist, is quite subdued in this role, presenting a more internalized character than we're used to seeing from her. She carries the film with a sort of soft internal clock, an awareness that if -- when, really -- her job becomes too stressful, she could die quite suddenly.
The Good Nurse is a curious film in that its director, who is Danish and hasn't directed many films yet, allows it to breathe a lot more than most thrillers. Indeed, this movie is lugubrious and will probably send most casual viewers to sleep. But if you tap into its unusual wavelength, the film slides into a similar groove to a David Fincher film, coldly calculating itself to within an inch of its efficacy, chilling in its cerebral attachment/emotional detachment to the proceedings. How do I make this jump? Easily, once I tell you about the other half of the film.
Charles Cullen is brought in as a new nurse to help in the ICU and quickly bonds with Amy. He joins the night shift and helps with her patients. When he learns her secret, he offers to help, even using a hiccup in a medicine vending machine to get her free pills. When he doesn't work, he even helps watch her daughters, who similarly bond with him. There doesn't appear to be romance between the two, which is interesting; one wonders if Amy considers him romantically or even sexually, but his role is more of a fairy godparent or kindly young uncle. He's too good to be true, at least from our perspective and Amy's.
So when one of Amy's patients suddenly and unexpectedly dies, things get a bit weird. An abnormal amount of insulin is found in her blood, which means she was dosed incorrectly. Amy knows she didn't do it, and continues about her work with a more watchful eye. The hospital's risk manager (a deliciously cold Kim Dickens) has notified the police as a matter of routine. The police begin interviewing staff, much to the hospital's chagrin, and the risk manager demands to be always present to mitigate any blowback or fallout. Dickens's presence injects the film with a nasty shock of realization, in case we didn't already know, that healthcare in America is sorely broken. The film could lean into this a lot more, and it would be awful and wonderful to behold. But that's not the story, and this isn't a manifesto.
It's not really ever a question of whether Charles is offing patients by overdoses, at least not for us. The drama and suspense of this film comes from our wondering when Amy will catch on, and then of course when the authorities will. The police investigators (Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha) do an extensive check on Charles, learning about his peripatetic and extensive work history at many other hospitals, none of which give details on his employment but all of which are suspiciously cagey about their relationship with him. Rumors will swirl, of course, and so the investigators approach Amy, Charles's closest thing to a confidant, to ask for her help in stopping him. All while more patients at her hospital die.
Ultimately, the film feels a bit like the documentary Deliver Us From Evil to me (it's my favorite documentary!) in that it lambasts the institutional systems that are so obsessed with protecting themselves that they are willing and even eager to allow predators to continue their crimes by mobilizing them and shuffling them around to other places instead of just stopping them. The only thing that stops this cycle of "business over ethics" is a person with integrity in the right place at the right time. That seems to be the impetus for dramatizing this story for both the screenwriter and the director. It helps to have two world-class A-list actors leading the way with deeply nuanced, introspective and introverted characters we don't usually see from them. And then there's the surreal story of the real-life Cullen, who may have killed hundreds of people during his career, which offers plenty of fodder for nightmares beyond this psychological thriller.
