The Good Nurse Review: A Film with A Cold and Deadly Atmosphere That Will Send A Shiver Down Your Spine
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne, Noah Emmerich, Kim Dickens, Maria Dizzia
Director: Tobias Lindholm
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
In our review of The Good Nurse, we will explain to you how Lindholm has made a solid feature film between drama and thriller elements, with a nod to certain procedural mechanisms of David Fincher’s cinema, without renouncing to put his two excellent protagonists, Jessica, in the foreground. Chastain and Eddie Redmayne. The new film with Oscar winners Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne arrives on Wednesday 26 October on Netflix, presented in a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and which has received excellent feedback from audiences and critics.
Inspired by a chilling true story, The Good Nurse is the first English-language feature film directed by Denmark’s Tobias Lindholm (writer for Thomas Vinterberg of outstanding films like Suspect and Another Round) and is the first fictional product to tell the story behind and the events related to Charles Cullen, an American nurse who between 1988 and 2003 is thought to have killed 29 hospital patients confirmed by investigations by injecting him with fatal doses of insulin and digoxin. However, it is thought that the victims of Cullen’s madness.
The Good Nurse Review: The Story
The film opens in the wards of Parkfield Memorial Hospital, a US health facility where nurse Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) works, single mother of two girls with cardiomyopathy that makes her daily life increasingly difficult; a new nurse arrives in the intensive care unit, a sweet and caring man who, however, seems to hide a troubled past. When some ICU patients begin dying suspiciously and frequently, Amy senses that Charles Cullen’s hand could be behind those deaths.
The English-language debut of the Scandinavian director and screenwriter Tobias Lindholm is a feature film made with skill and precise ideas, particularly respectful of the real story and the people involved. Cold, with gaudy glacial tones, The Good Nurse is a real nightmare on the hospital ward, where you can breathe an aseptic and deadly atmosphere at every moment.
The Good Nurse Review and Analysis
The Good Nurse is a feature film with a double soul: on the one hand, it fascinates and captures the viewer’s attention for the story it tells and which sheds light on the background of one of the most sinister serial killers in American history, on the other hand, it has a clear set up like a procedural movie, which follows step by step the searches and investigations of the local police crossed with those of the investigation inside the hospital, macabre site of some of the suspected deaths in intensive care. Telling effectively the personality and the innermost motivations of a serial murderer is never easy, one often falls into the purest trivialization of cruel acts, even worse in the spectacularization at all costs, ending up discontent and irritating many parties at stake.
Lindholm’s film, on the other hand, plays ahead of its time and decides to take perhaps the safest and most beaten path, packaging a film with a thriller tone that emphasizes the banality of Evil in a deliberately icy and destabilizing package: as it happened to Amy Loughren, the big bad wolf can nestle in even the most harmless of sheep; a traumatic fact that the Danish director lowers to the daily experience not only of the nurse protagonist but of all of us.
This an icy assumption that Tobias Lindholm accentuates most when he plays his best cards; in fact, it is impossible not to affirm that the solid The Good Nurse is based mostly on the splendid interpretations provided by the two protagonists. If Jessica Chastain gives Amy her grit and fragility with acting that is finally under the lines and naturalistic at the right point, it is Eddie Redmayne who gives the audience the thrills expected from the film. The face and the indecipherable movements of the British interpreter are simply spot on in returning all the enigmatic and duplicity of Charles Cullen.
At first, a shy nurse, a little sociopathic but with a big heart towards Amy and her two girls, the portrait that Redmayne makes of his Charlie unexpectedly transforms him into a monster without human mercy with motivations still never clarified today: the absolute evil that is he hides in an aseptic curtain of empathic coldness, a criminal identikit that is well suited to the misdeeds of the Cullen in question. Ultimately, The Good Nurse offers the viewer a fresh and inspiring perspective on the story of how one of America’s most prolific and chilling serial killers was spotted and captured after years of inadmissible negligence on the part of the hospitals that housed him as an employee, a real cinematic rant against a system, the American health system, guilty of never having acted before despite the countless victims of Cullen in previous years.
The Good Nurse Review: The Last words
The Good Nurse tells the story behind the arrest of one of the most chilling and prolific serial killers in the history of the United States of America. To stage this true story, two exceptional interpreters: Jessica Chastain in the role of nurse Amy and Eddie Redmayne, are at ease in those of the icy and sociopathic Charles Cullen. A film with a cold and deadly atmosphere that will send a shiver down your spine. A programmatic premise that owes much of its narrative language and its form to David Fincher’s best cinema, but also to contemporary true crime seriality; in fact, it is no coincidence that Tobias Lindholm has carried out the duties of screenwriter and director of a couple of episodes of the Netflix series Mindhunter, among other things produced by Fincher himself.
