Movie Details
Movie: The Good Nurse (2022)
Director: Tobias Lindholm
Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Jessica Chastain, and Denise Pillott
Movie Type: Crime/Thriller
Release date: 11 September 2022
IMDB Rating: 6.8/10
Language: English
Duration: 2h 01m
Trailer
Synopsis
I’ve been waiting a long time for Jessica Chastain to return to performances from the Interstellar era and 30 minutes after midnight, and this year I finally got it. However, the film The Good Nurse, which has been on Netflix for a few days, surprisingly took me back much further than just to the last decade. The new chilling crime from the hands of the award-winning Danish creator Tobias Lindholm and screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns ( The Last Night in Soho) tells a true story from the zero years of the 21st century, which, for a change, is reminiscent of Fincher’s Seven and the depressed nineties. But before you get excited, it’s only marginal, but all the more welcome inspiration, because the rest of The Good Nurse can be a little harder to digest.
The film tells the story of nurse Amy (Chastain), who is also a single mother working the night shift and battling heart disease. One day, she meets a new colleague Charlie (Eddie Redmayne) at work, who at first glance is kind, sensitive, and considerate. But when patients start dying on their floor, Amy suspects that Charlie may not be as innocent as he appears.
As for the background of the film, Wilson-Cairns wrote it seven years ago, long before her other projects, and Lindholm first stumbled upon it during his work for Fincher on the series Mindhunter. The inspiration and a kind of contribution of the acclaimed director of Gone and Others is evident here in practically every shot, even the visual patina is practically the same as Fincher’s. After seven years of fine-tuning the script, it probably won’t surprise anyone that the film also works well in terms of the motivations of individual characters, building tension, twists and turns, and gradation.
The villain here is not only the sociopath with the face of Redmayne, about whose guilt there is practically no doubt from the first scene, but also the very corporation he works for, which anxiously sweeps all traces under the carpet before the investigating detectives, a system that allowed the suspected medical brother to change hospital after hospital, and finally the bureaucracy, thanks to which we once again watch justice hanging by a thin thread before it falls on one side or the other. That’s why I mention the young screenwriter and the experienced Lindholm so much because they did a brilliant job in this direction. But you’re probably already waiting for the “but”, which is inevitably coming, right?
…but it lacks spark! The Good Nurse has a solid pace and I definitely can’t say that I would be bored with her. I think that it could have been shortened (the film is two hours long), and especially the final passages lacked a little more emphasis and pull on the gate. The problem is mainly with emotions and the impact on me as a viewer. Mindhunter, Seven, and Zmizelá can be described as cold crime films, the master never forgot to have fun with them – even if only minimally. At least a minute glimpse, an inconspicuous joke, an allusion, anything that adds variety to the narrative, polishes the precisely drawn characters, and lightens the overall experience in some way. The Good Nurse is sorely missed, and even if there are tense scenes or emotional moments, the film is always so cold during them that it practically does not allow you to connect with the characters in any way and experience their hardships, anger, or horror with them.
It seems like a small flaw, but it does an awful lot for this type of film, and because of that, although I enjoyed the performances of both leads (Redmayne is not suited to any role other than a sociopath, after all), I can’t give it a higher score than, um, seven. At the same time, the detective duo was likable, the procedural bullshit was rightly frustrating, and if someone had told me that the music was composed by Reznor and Ross, I would have believed them. It’s just a shame about the atmosphere. One of the stronger notches on Netflix, but unfortunately slightly behind in the genre competition.
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