Mark Reviews Movies: THE GOOD NURSE

The Good Nurse, Netflix

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | October 19, 2022

Dramatizing the discovery of the man who might be the deadliest known serial killer, The Good Nurse is as much an indictment of a system that allowed him to murder so many as it is a procedural about the process of catching him. Director Tobias Lindholm's cold dedication to facts, though, prevents the movie from communicating the outrage and horror that such a real-life case should provoke.

By the end of this, we know how Charles Cullen, a nurse who poisoned patients with medication, killed and how at least some official number of his crimes was discovered, although the suspicion is that the actual victims total in the hundreds. As for what lessons we're meant to take from such a personal abuse of power and the institutional indifference or fear that allowed him to work for so long at so many different hospitals, Krysty Wilson-Cairns' screenplay would rather stick to the more basic questions of method and means.

Charlie, as the man is called in this adaptation of Charles Graeber's non-fiction book, is played by Eddie Redmayne in the kind of performance that's unsettling because of how little the character gives away about his true nature. For the most part, Redmayne's work is exemplified by the movie's enigmatic opening scene, which sees Charlie, circa the late 1990s, in a hospital room as doctors and other nurses try to revive the unseen patient.

This interpretation of the story also has an issue in terms of showing the cost of this man's crimes. A couple victims are briefly presented, given glimpses of personal lives, and disappear except as names on a list. Neither they nor the friends and family members those victims leave behind are provided a second thought here.

The first and primary one on the filmmakers' minds belongs to Charlie's face, which simply watches as the patient dies in front him. The camera keeps moving closer and closer, until that visage takes up most of the frame but, even in such extreme detail, doesn't suggest even the hint of emotion. There's no answer as to why Charlie has killed at the end (save for a line that makes the other target clear, in case the rest of the story hasn't made it so that), so the best we have is this look of complete apathy.

That's enough for what the story becomes, one supposes, since the real focus is on Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), a newly hired nurse working at an intensive care unit. She's provided with some personal details—a single mother working the night shift and being absent from her two daughters' lives—and a health-based complication—a heart condition that could lead to a stroke and a need to keep working to obtain health insurance. The character, though, primarily serves as much a part of the investigation, which becomes the bulk of the plot, as a pair of local police detectives (played by Noah Emmerich and Malik Yoba) who are alerted to a suspicious death at the hospital. Chastain's harried performance does a lot to give Amy some sense of being more than a key part of the plot.

A patient, whom Amy had been tending to before Charlie takes over to give her a break, does die under mysterious, unexplained circumstances. The hospital, represented here by Kim Dickens' risk manager, begrudgingly informs the police—seven weeks later and after the dead woman's body already has been cremated. While the detectives try to piece together some answers to that death, another patient, a new mother, dies under similarly unknown circumstances, and Amy, who has become a close friend the seemingly police and friendly and helpful Charlie, starts to suspect her co-worker. That's especially true after the cops let her know that Charlie was fired from other hospitals following cases just like the ones she's seeing now.

Some of this straightforward material has a bit more depth than a basic recounting of the killer's methods, the investigation into them, and the attempt to put an end to them. The two cops serve as a bit more than arbiter's of back story, explaining where Charlie has been and what he might have done, as they're stymied and befuddled by the hospital administration's refusal to take action or even to provide information. Their specific frustration becomes our own general kind about how a lack of oversight and the instinct for legal self-preservation could allow such horror to continue unstopped for years.

Amy doubts the accusations at first, because Charlie is so convincing, and comes to fear for her own and her children's safety. Redmayne's subdued work here is eerie, although with a significant caveat. Lindholm undermines that quality in the character's final moments, as all of the darkness and some vague sense of "madness" erupts to the surface in a scene that confirms what we already know but doesn't help to explain anything about the dramatized version of the character or his real-life counterpart.

There is, of course, no explanation that could suffice here, and the filmmakers deserve some credit for avoiding any kind of attempt. The Good Nurse wants us to see these crimes and their implications from a few angles (although, again, the absence of the perspective of the people hurt the most is noticeable), but the result possesses only a vague sense of purpose for telling this story.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Book

Buy the Book (Kindle Edition)