The Good Nurse: LFF Film Review
I love a shocking true crime story so The Good Nurse was right up my street.
The thriller tells the story of Charles Cullen (played by Eddie Redmayne), one of the most prolific serial killers in US history. He often leaves his hospitals surrounded by rumours and speculation about suspicious patient deaths but still manages to get another nursing job to carry on his horrific behaviour.
The Good Nurse isn’t a tense whodunit mystery because the audience knows it’s Charlie killing these patients all along. It is mostly a police procedural following detectives Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) as they figure it out and find enough evidence to prove it.
This is not another serial killer story that focuses on the psychopath, glamorises him or retraumatises the victims in any way. The story is told through the eyes of his colleague Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), who eventually cooperates with the police investigation. She is the lead character and for the most part, Charlie is seen as her close friend, a nice, kind man and a reliable nurse – which makes his actions more sinister and shocking. I really liked that the story was framed around Amy (who is also real) because what she did was incredibly brave and important and the focus should be on her rather than him.
Although I will never truly buy her as a normal person with that stunning appearance, Chastain does a great job playing the stressed single mother-of-two who then has the added headache of the police investigation.
Redmayne seemed like an odd choice for Charlie when it was announced but it makes total sense when you watch it – Charlie was a nice, friendly person and that suits Redmayne. He is fine when he’s playing normal everyday Charlie but turns into a laughably OTT villain (think Jupiter Ascending) in one of his final scenes. It’s hard to believe that an Oscar-winning actor could produce such work.
The film also makes you really angry about the American healthcare system. As it’s a for-profit business, they just sweep Charlie’s actions under the carpet so they don’t have to accept any liability and reveal they employed a serial killer. But because of this, Charlie gets employed time and time again and can keep killing patients!! It makes my blood boil.
The Good Nurse is a straightforward and low-key serial killer tale that I found utterly gripping.
In selected cinemas from 19th October and on Netflix from 26th October
Here is my interview with screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Tobias Lindholm and highlights from the cast’s Q&A at LFF.
*Offing these people? What an abhorrent way to write about people, especially those who were killed by someone they trusted in their most vulnerable state.
My apologies, I have changed that word.
I think you underestimate the depths of Cullen’s psychosis. I read the book after catching the screening last week, and there’s a description of two of his episodes that sounds exactly like in the film.
Case in point :
“Your motion to recuse is denied,” says Judge Platt.
“No no, Your Honor,” Cullen interrupts, “you need, you need to step
down. Your Honor, you need to step down.”
“If you continue this I will gag and manifold you,” the judge warns. But
Cullen shouts over him. “Your Honor, you need to step down! Your Honor,
you need to step down! Your Honor . . .”
The court is a beautiful room, but a terrible courtroom, formed entirely of
hard marble surfaces that amplify and distort sound. Charles Cullen fills
this room. The families wait, holding their carefully prepared statements to
their chests, as Cullen gets to speed-shouting his statement ten times, thirty,
forty. He is not going to stop, and now the court officers are on him. They
pull a spit mask over his head—a mesh veil that keeps a prisoner from
hawking lugies on his captors—but the noise continues.
They wrap the spit mask with a towel and push him into the chair,
bunching the towel at the back of his head and screwing it tight, so that now
all that’s left of the tantrum is the bass cadence, like a man screaming into a
pillow”