The Good Nurse, Tobias Lindholm’s follow up to the twice Oscar-nominated film, Another Round (which he wrote, but The Good Nurse he directs) is being sold as a serial killer thriller by Netflix. Based on the actual events of a nurse named Charlie Cullen who effectively poisoned a number of his patients for mysterious reasons, The Good Nurse does technically qualify as a genre film in the serial killer line, but it’s less interested in the murders and the methods than it is in the story of a friendship gone foul.
The de facto title character is Amy Loughren (played by Jessica Chastain, who is on a serious career roll), a nurse whose biggest problem isn’t the health of her ICU patients (at least not at first), or the skeleton crew staffing of her hospital that leaves just her and one other nurse to man their floor. Amy has a serious heart condition, no health care, and two young daughters to look after on her own.
Now, you might ask, how is it possible that a nurse didn’t have health care insurance? The events of the film take place in the early 2000s, before Obamacare, and at a time when it was fairly standard to make an employee wait up to six months before receiving benefits. This lack of insurance requires Loughren to pay out of pocket to providers unaffiliated with her hospital because if her condition were to be discovered, she would surely lose her job.
In steps Charlie Cullen (a never better Eddie Redmayne) an experienced nurse who lands on Loughren’s floor, and before long becomes an integral part of Amy’s life. He helps her conceal her condition, sneaks meds for her out of the hospital dispensary, and is a near daily staple in her home, helping her with her children.
But then, slowly, we learn that Cullen has bounced around from hospital to hospital, each of which experienced high, unexplained death rates while he was working there.. In an astonishing turn of events, we find that suspicion has followed him from each work stop, but the suits that run the hospitals would rather quietly force him out than deal with the possibility of a nurse committing nefarious deeds.
Cullen’s new hospital is no different. When a woman dies mysteriously and paperwork points to a possible overdose of insulin, the head of the hospital (a former nurse herself, well played by the always terrific Kim Dickens), slow-walks the results of an incredibly paltry internal investigation to the investigating police officers (a very solid Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha).
The effort to obscure malfeasance and move around a dangerous nurse reminded me of another film where an organization allowed dangerous men to move from place to place without accountability: the 2015 best picture winner, Spotlight. Like Spotlight, The Good Nurse is largely a quiet film about procedure, not just by that of the police, but also by the hospitals who obfuscated and looked the other way when they surely knew something was rotten.
In one of the few moments of the film where a voice is raised, Asomugha’s officer shouts down Dickens with full-throated anger, and great moral conviction, when he tells her, “You know what you’re doing.” That blowup leads to the officers being banned from the hospital (an extraordinary fact in itself), and leaves the two detectives with only one hope to uncover Cullen’s crimes: Amy Loughren.
At first, as one might expect, Loughren is reluctant to believe that Cullen could be guilty of such horrendous behavior. To work with the police to reveal Cullen’s murders, Loughren must not only put her job on the line (she’s contracted to only speak to police with a member of hospital administration present), but also her health, and her friendship with Charlie. Because here’s the fascinating thing: Loughren really does need a Charlie in her life.
His willingness to cover for her at work and help her at home truly seems to come from a kind place, which makes one ponder the thought, “can evil be kind?” Perhaps it can, but maybe the more important question is, “does it matter?”
As we see Loughren’s own sense of morality come to the fore, it’s impossible not to take note of what an extraordinarily courageous act she is committing. Amy’s best friend is a killer of her patients, and no administrator is going to stand in the way of her doing what’s right.
Of course, all of that is very noble, but it only matters cinematically if the film is convincing. What I found most admirable about The Good Nurse is that it never oversells the drama. It presents Amy as a woman in an inconceivable situation who refuses to be less than she should be. To help the police capture Cullen, she must break her own afflicted heart.
When Chastain recently won best actress for The Eyes of Tammy Faye, there were a lot of turned up noses in the world of film criticism who felt her performance was too big (as if playing Tammy Faye Bakker leaves any other option). Here, we see Chastain really dial it down to the point where you can barely see her acting at all. Taking into account the width and breadth of her career, I find her range astonishing.
While there are strong supporting turns in the film, The Good Nurse is largely a two-hander. For this film to be successful, both Chastain and Redmayne must be working in concert. Redmayne is not an actor I have warmed to in the past, but here, he is genuinely remarkable. His Charlie Cullen rides this imperceptible line between sweetness and wickedness. Because the real Cullen has never explained why he murdered so many of his patients, Redmayne is not given the typical scene where the killer exposes his motivations. At one point, he simply says, “I just did it.”
There is a scene later in the film where Cullen finally has an outburst and as terrifying as it is, it is not as chilling as Redmayne saying “I just did it,” as if the words escaped his mouth by accident.
It occurred to me after the film was over that if someone asked Amy Loughren why she took such an incredible risk to help bring Cullen to justice that she might have simply said the same line. She just did it too. Of course, what she did was honorable and decent. But then, she was a good nurse.
