The Good Nurse

Grade: B+

I enjoy thrillers where a major character has a dark shady past, and may not be the harmless, innocent friend that they appear. Tim Robbins in Arlington Road comes to mind. Now comes The Good Nurse, a Netflix Original film that recently dropped. This marks Tobias Lindholm’s first English-language feature film as a director. He has some nice credits; he was a writer for Another Round – my second favorite foreign language movie of the last three years.

He knows how to “speak Netflix.” The Good Nurse (perfectly titled, as it made me wonder which main character – or both – it was referring to) successfully sucked me into the quicksand of binging, as the streaming platform is so notorious for doing. I didn’t want to stop watching, even when I had to change devices. I have to talk about the lighting. It’s distractingly dark. In the first hour and a half, I kept pausing to check the settings on the TV’s brightness. It was already set to its default “maximum.” I turned off lights, closed curtains, then finally got frustrated enough to finish it on my phone. Even with the brightness turned up to nuclear winter, the movie still had lots of shadows and dim scenes. I thought I was just getting old and blind, until I saw another review where the critic noted the same issue.

The film, nonetheless, is a well-done low-key medical drama that turns into a true crime thriller. We follow Amy, a single mother who works as a nurse at a New Jersey hospital. She has a heart condition and is in danger of a stroke, but needs to have worked there a certain amount of time to get her health insurance – and she has a few months until that happens. She camouflages it best she can, and doesn’t tell any co-workers. The first one she confides in is recent new hire Charlie. They are very helpful to each other, and they bond over being single parents (his two young daughters are with his ex-wife). He even befriends Amy’s two daughters, and comes over to help babysit from time to time. Then, a string of unexpected deaths start happening among the patients. All for the same reason: an abnormal amount of insulin was found in their systems. Somebody has been “spiking” the I.V. bags.

I won’t say whether Charlie has anything to do with this. As The Good Nurse is based on a true story, you can easily find out if you want. Amy and Charlie are played by Academy Award winners Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne. It’s great to see them underplay and be down-to-earth with their acting choices. As we spend most of the movie wondering what the real deal is with Redmayne, and as he’s such a lovable British actor, it’s interesting to see him give off an unsettling vibe. Or maybe not, if he’s innocent and there’s nothing to be creeped out by. In a lesser movie, I could have easily seen a romance evolve between Amy and Charlie – but that doesn’t happen. And I kept waiting for that cheap jump scare when a quiet character is being interrogated and then suddenly snaps. But that doesn’t happen. It’s refreshing how The Good Nurse avoids so many cliché holes it could have fallen into.

Grade: B+