This true-crime tale, starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, dramatizes the story of Charles Cullen, a nurse who was discovered to be a serial killer.
No one knows how many patients Charles Cullen murdered in his career as a hospital nurse. Cullen confessed to 29 intentional deaths; some experts speculate the actual count may be as high as 400. Why poison the people entrusted to his care? Cullen, currently serving multiple life sentences at New Jersey State Prison, has yet to share his motives, and the “The Good Nurse,” a grim feel-bad drama by the director Tobias Lindholm (a co-writer of the feel-good Oscar winner “Another Round”) isn’t interested in scrounging up a guess. When the film’s Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne, tries to explain himself, Lindholm muffles his voice with a police siren and wailing violins.
Instead, Lindholm and the scriptwriter, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, set out to answer a more fundamental question: how did Cullen get away with it for 16 years across nine different hospitals? Were his employers too strapped for resources and personnel to notice — or were they so scared of lawsuits that they selfishly pushed out Cullen to become another community’s problem without so much as a single bad letter of reference, let alone a call to outside authorities?
The movie implies the latter. Lindholm and Wilson-Cairns, who were both raised in countries with nationalized health care, view the United States medical system as a business centered on having patients, not helping them. They’ve fictionalized the names of the hospitals, as well as the names of the dead, to give themselves leeway to reconstruct Cullen’s last place of work as a house of horrors shot in such dingy, dungeon-y grays by the cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes that Dr. Frankenstein would fit right in.
Nearly every scene is an indignity: corpses left neglected in beds, loved ones grieving next to the sickly glow of a vending machine, managers haranguing their exhausted staff about the cost of coffee filters. Even the story’s heroine, a nurse named Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) who provides the only empathy in this miserable tale, is also one of its victims. The single mother of two is tirelessly devoted to her patients despite a heart condition that puts her at high risk for a stroke. Yet her own hospital won’t provide her with health insurance until she’s worked there for a year, a common plight for contract workers that Lindholm sees as a moral affront that falls somewhere between bitter irony and indentured servitude.
There’s a touch of Gogol-esque satire in a subplot in which two investigating detectives (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich) are thwarted by hospital bureaucrats who downplay deaths as “unexplainable incidents,” in the words of a chillingly placid risk manager (Kim Dickens), and, when low on excuses, put the cops on hold with punishing Muzak. Similarly, while Redmayne mostly plays his murderer at a low hum, he allows himself one scene to unleash his big mime energy, theatrically gasping and twitching and letting his long fingers crawl over his face. The moment is reminiscent of Anthony Perkins at the end of “Psycho,” but “The Good Nurse” offers no assurances that its danger is safely locked away. In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.
The Good Nurse
Rated R for language. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
