A bad nurse rising: Horrifying true story becomes chilling thriller
Anyone who has ever spent any significant time in a hospital knows how much blind faith patients put in the medical staff. You’re sick or injured and helpless and scared: you not only trust the doctors and nurses caring for you, but you’re beyond grateful to them for helping you get healthy and back to your life. But what if a nurse didn’t have your best interest at heart, but the exact opposite? Suddenly the hospital would no longer be a safe space of healing and comfort, but a house of horrors. Such is the chilling premise of the terrific new film The Good Nurse.
Based on a true story that you may recall from the national headlines it garnered, the film is adapted from Charles Graeber’s 2013 book of the same name. Danish writer/director Tobias Lindholm (Another Round; The Hunt), working from a script by Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917; Last Night in Soho) dramatizes the chilling tale of Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), an ICU nurse in the Northeast with a huge secret.
Since the story was all over the news, it’s no spoiler to share that Charlie’s secret is that, in what may be the worst violation of the Hippocratic Oath ever, he’s a serial killer of the patients in his care. By the end of his reign of terror, he was convicted of 29 murders, though authorities estimate his grand total may have been closer to 400. How Charlie was able to get away with murdering so many patients in a 16 year career that spanned nine hospitals – none of which ever faced any repercussions – is the subject of Lindholm’s. The why, however, is, frustratingly, more murky.
Nurse Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) serves as our proxy in the film, as she uncovers Charlie’s sinister side just as we do. When Charlie is assigned to help with the night shift in the understaffed ICU where Amy works, the two become fast friends, as she’s taken with Charlie’s generosity of spirit and compassion with patients. Amy trusts him enough to reveal a secret of her own, and to bring him home to bond with her two young daughters.
The film’s great strength comes from the dread of watching Amy slowly realize that Charlie not only is not the “Good Nurse” of the title, but also is not the Good Friend or the Good Person. Both Chastain and Redmayne are exceptional here, with Chastain masterfully showcasing the complicated emotional move from doubt to fear to steely resolve. And Redmayne creates a villain so terrifying in his sociopathology that he, not Michael Myers in the new Halloween Ends, should win the award for most frightening evildoer of October — or of all time, for that matter. To watch Redmayne in two tense, hold-your-breath confrontation scenes with Chastain’s Amy and with two detectives (Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha) is to witness nothing less than the face of stark malevolent madness. Redmayne’s performance will leave you shaking.
But the film indicts more than just Charlie Cullen. The healthcare industry itself comes under searing scrutiny, as we learn that none of the hospitals in which Charlie worked ever did anything more than fire him for bureaucratic reasons, even as suspicions about him abounded. Fear of liability and expensive lawsuits kept hospital administrations quiet as Charlie moved from nursing job to nursing job. You’ll be infuriated by the scenes in which Kim Dickens, playing an administrator at Charlie’s current hospital, prevaricates, stalls, and withholds data and information from investigating detectives. “First do no harm” is thrown out the window, and we are left appropriately appalled.
While I strongly encourage everyone to see this film, for its excellent performances, its taut, nail-biting script, and its pointed commentary on the state of American medicine, you might want to hold off if you’re about to have any sort of in-hospital procedure. You’ll want to be confident and trusting of your care team, and The Good Nurse is so powerful that you just might rethink your medical decisions after seeing it.
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The Good Nurse opens today at select Bay Area theaters, including at San Francisco’s Landmark Opera Plaza Cinema. It will also be available on Netflix on Wednesday, Oct. 26th.
