Opposite him, Jessica Chastain plays the “good nurse” in the film’s title. Everything a little sterile.
Netflix is fascinated by true crime. While this subgenre’s popularity has exploded in recent years given our collective, sometimes morally dubious, true crime fetish, true crime series and documentaries are incredibly rife on the US streamer these days. The story about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is currently one of the most popular series. Now Charles Cullen joins them.
As a nurse, the American killed at least 29 people in the 1990s and 2000s, but the number of unreported cases is closer to 400, according to the film’s credits. It’s not about him at first, but about Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), who works in the intensive care unit of a hospital in New Jersey. She’s a single mom and caring nurse who toils away trying to hide her heart condition to get health insurance that will allow her to have a heart transplant. And although a doctor warns her that if she tries too hard, she could die, she has no choice.
To relieve them, the kind male nurse Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) is hired, and at first he comes across as a lifesaver. He helps Amy, he cooks for her, he even takes care of her two daughters while secretly sending patients to sleep forever. This goes well until so many people die unexpectedly that the police start investigating, and Amy wonders who she’s really friends with.
At the helm of the star-studded drama is Danish director Tobias Lindholm, perhaps best known as co-writer of Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘The Hunt’ (2012) and ‘The Intoxication’ (2020), and with this adaptation by Charles Graebers non-fiction makes its English-language debut. Unlike some of the more controversial Netflix productions like “Dahmer: Monster”, “The Good Nurse” is not very sensational. Lindholm also shoots everything pretty sterile. This is admirable in that the drama avoids luridly re-enacting the events. But what we get is almost too reserved. It feels like the respect for this true story was so overwhelming that the creators forgot to give their film a pulse.
Because of this no-nonsense approach, the two Oscar winners don’t have much room to play. As Amy, Jessica Chastain (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) is heartfelt and thoughtful. She brings the needed humanity to the film, but the actress has had more exciting roles.
Eddie Redmayne (“The Discovery of Infinity”) is the more interesting character. He plays Cullen as a quiet, introverted person, which makes him both reassuring and unsettling. Little is known about Charles Cullen in this film, what drives him and why he does the things he does. This is fascinating on the one hand, but also very frustrating.
Basically, “The Good Nurse” is a critique of the American health care system, and it works as such. One of the reasons Cullen got away with it for so long was that the various hospitals he worked for didn’t report him to avoid legal repercussions and financial loss – thus protecting a serial killer.
Source: Nachrichten
