Leonie Benesch Brings a Quiet Intensity to Her Role in ‘Late Shift’

The German actress Leonie Benesch appears in every scene of Petra Volpe’s “Late Shift,” a tense drama about a night nurse in an understaffed hospital.

The film, which screens at the inaugural edition of South by Southwest London on Tuesday in its British debut, follows Benesch’s character, Floria, over the course of a single night. She rushes from bedside to bedside, bringing patients painkillers or peppermint tea and calms their nerves by trying to get hold of a doctor — or just by singing to them.

To prepare for the role, Benesch said she shadowed nurses in a hospital for a week, learning to handle medical equipment and internalizing the rhythm of care work.

“I wanted to understand the choreography and how do they move. How do they interact with patients? What’s the code-switching between talking to one another and talking to patients?” Benesch, 34, said in an interview. “The challenge for me,” she added, “was that a health care professional watch this and go: She could be one of us.”

The actress spoke in May from a hotel bar in Cardiff, Wales, in crisp British-accented English. She was in Wales filming the political thriller “Prisoner,” the sort of large-budget international television production that dots her résumé along with smaller art house films.