The Good Nurse Review: A Well-Acted but Dreary Medical Drama
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The post The Good Nurse Review: A Well-Acted but Dreary Medical Drama appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: In 2003, New Jersey nurse and single mom Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) worked nights at the Parkfield Memorial Hospital, providing goodwill to her patients in the ICU while dealing with a potentially life-threatening heart condition of her own.
One evening, she meets Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), a new worker on her staff, also a single father with two daughters. Their shared experiences in the fields of parenthood and medicine bond Amy and Charles together, with Charles even going out of his way to spend time with Amy’s girls and sneak her proper medication so she can avoid paying for her expensive doctor’s appointments.
But while Charles and Amy’s friendship begins to bloom, so do a series of unexpected insulin-related deaths at their workplace, prompting suspicion from local detectives Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich).
While more details around these occurrences emerge, a worrisome Amy starts to wonder if her new friend might be behind this deadly pattern, one that may have in fact spanned over 16 years at the various hospitals that have employed Charles. As Amy attempts to get to the bottom of this, she finds herself struggling to reconcile the nice guy Charles is with the quietly lethal serial killer he could be.
A Weak Pulse: At first glance, The Good Nurse seems like a pretty damning microcosm of the American healthcare industry, criticizing the system’s profit-driven negligence and how it creates unnecessary grief and stress for people unable to get the care they need. In particular, the people at the helm of this business, like the Parkfield administrator Linda Garren (Kim Dickens), reflect this dehumanization, using clinical terminology like “expired” instead of “died” when talking about deceased patients.
But upon further inspection, Tobias Lindholm’s fourth feature (and first English-language effort) doesn’t quite explore or reveal much else beyond these ideas. Though the film factors in Amy’s economic and emotional limitations as an example of our healthcare system’s bleakness, it resists seeking out any deeper insight in favor of a pallid procedural thriller and stiff medical drama.
The Good Nurse (Netflix)
Even with Chastain and Redmayne’s solidly restrained performances and Biosphere’s eerie, ambient string score, the mystery at the center of The Good Nurse unravels in exactly the way you’d expect it to. The film is more slow than burn, drawing out the suspense of its based-on-a-true-story narrative to glacial and predictable lengths. Subtlety can be useful in conveying stories as dark and twisted as this one, but the abundance of it here flattens the story’s emotional impact and makes its brief jolts of melodrama feel abrupt and jarring.
Code Blues: Right from the jump, The Good Nurse attempts to complicate our understanding of Charles, though it’s pretty obvious from the get-go that something’s up with him. Redmayne’s measured performance indicates as much, telegraphing Charles’s masquerade through creepily relaxed composure and hunched physicality.
Sometimes, this calculated approach works to the film’s benefit. For example, in the long-take opener — one of the very few truly gripping moments in The Good Nurse’s monotonous two hours — we see Charles notice a seizing patient and call for help. More nurses file into the room to subdue the patient and the camera slowly zooms in on Charles, consumed with a mix of fear, guilt, and terror.
By obscuring the action and stitching our perspective onto Charles’s nerve-wracked face, The Good Nurse establishes his character’s complexity well, making us ponder if Charles is genuinely worried about the state of the patient, if he’s simply hoping no one will find out he caused the seizure to happen, or perhaps more chillingly, both.
Low Pressure: Redmayne, Lindholm, and 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns keep playing up that tension as The Good Nurse continues to revel in Charles’s ambiguous actions, albeit leading to somewhat unsatisfying results. His curious amount of empathy for Amy sets up the stakes of their relationship well, forcing Amy to later reckon with the difficulty of implicating him to the police knowing that he offered her nothing but good company.
But because we learn very little about Charles, besides him not having custody over his kids, the ambiguity around his motives carries little to no depth. It’s likely this could have been a deliberate choice, suggesting that audiences can try their best to figure out why people like Charles commit such heinous crimes and are ultimately forced to draw their own conclusions.
The Good Nurse (Netflix)
Regardless, including details from the real-life Charles’s background, such as his military enlistment, history of suicide attempts, the devastating impact of his mother’s death, or his wife’s restraining order against him, would have at least clued us into his psychology a little better and given his character some stronger shades of nuance. Instead, Charles is frustratingly reduced to an elusive, inscrutable antagonist, leaving much to be desired despite Redmayne’s committed portrayal.
The Good Nurse makes it pretty evident too that there’s no other possible person who could have done this, what with Detectives Baldwin and Braun cracking the case without encountering much conflict or bureaucracy stopping them. Sure, their investigation hits a few roadblocks when interrogating Linda, but they have an in once they discover Amy’s relationship to Charles and ask for her cooperation in incriminating him.
Since this is a true story, it would be somewhat facetious to contrive tantalizing subplots for narrative’s sake. But similar to the lack of clarity around Charles’s motives, The Good Nurse’s lean procedural tendencies could’ve certainly used a little more meat.
At the very least, the reliably compelling Chastain mostly sells her character’s turmoil, her compassion hardening into paranoia once the thought of a seemingly uncommonly decent person secretly being a prolific murderer enters her mind. After an illuminating conversation with a friend and former co-worker of Charles’s (Maria Dizzia, queen of mini character acting parts) further confirms her intuition, Amy is driven to eventually wear a wire and confront Charles at a diner, with the two dancing around the elephant in the room in one of the film’s tensest scenes.
Capturing this and the rest of The Good Nurse’s hushed drama is cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, who adds some visual panache to the film’s frigid environments and drab color palette. Her camerawork, which was put to good use in other acclaimed dramas like 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene and 2016’s Manchester by the Sea, enlivens each frame, grafting some chilly atmosphere onto what would otherwise be a dull or mundane moment. The Good Nurse feels as cold as it looks, which can be both effective in illustrating the bone-chilling nature of these killings and simultaneously off-putting in watching the mystery behind them unfold.
The Verdict: Aside from its occasional clashing tonal shifts and overly pared-down narrative approach, what’s most disappointing about The Good Nurse is its insistence that Charles was simply a perplexing human being whose motives were impossible to figure out. The film ends on a note mentioning that it was never explained why Cullen overdosed his patients, but do a little Googling and you see that that statement is somewhat misleading.
Considering The Good Nurse doesn’t seem to veer too far off from the truth in its dramatization, the creative liberty taken here is a rather disingenuous one, motivated seemingly to create a greater air of mystery as opposed to honoring the facts that are presently available. You’d think that adding more context would be not only more compelling, but necessary.
For what it’s worth, Chastain and Redmayne make for an interesting on-screen duo, with both award-winning actors inhabiting roles that service their talents nicely. But by keeping us emotionally at arm’s length, The Good Nurse doesn’t actualize its dramatic potential to the fullest degree, relying mainly on the power of its stars to carry the story instead of building a much more intricate, immersive story around them.
Where to Watch: The Good Nurse is streaming now on Netlfix.
Trailer:
The Good Nurse Review: A Well-Acted but Dreary Medical Drama
Sam Rosenberg
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