The bizarre and horrifying story of real-life serial killer nurse Charles Cullen is getting the two-fer treatment from Netflix this fall: first with the star-power feature film “The Good Nurse,” co-billing Oscar winners Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, followed by the November documentary “Capturing the Killer Nurse.” Both works are based on Charles Graeber’s non-fiction book “The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder,” about a New Jersey nurse who admitted to murdering dozens of patients and is suspected of killing even more — as many as 400.
In the hands of the Danish director Tobias Lindholm and screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917,” “Last Night in Soho”) and thanks in large part to the towering twin performances of the equally chameleon-like Chastain and Redmayne, “The Good Nurse” is a solid albeit conventional medical thriller that overcomes a few plodding stretches and ends in bittersweet fashion. (The most moving sequence in the entire movie is a quietly subtle, almost mundane vignette at the very end that left tears in my eyes. I think you’ll understand and agree when you experience it for yourself.)
Filmed primarily in Stamford, Connecticut, with exterior shots in New Jersey and Pennsylvania as well, “The Good Nurse” has a suitably industrial, blue-collar look. Following a brief and chilling prologue set in a hospital in 1996 as a patient experiences cardiac arrest, we flash forward to 2003, where Chastain’s Amy Loughren is a nurse and single mother working back-breaking, emotionally exhausting overnight shifts at an understaffed, rather drab, middle-tier New Jersey hospital.
With cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes delivering a steady stream of intense close-ups of Chastain’s wonderfully expressive face, we feel instant empathy for the kindly, stressed-out Amy, who develops a true rapport with her patients and their loved ones, despite coping with an increasingly serious heart problem of her own that often leaves her literally gasping for air — and then coming home just in time to spend a few precious moments with her young daughters before they have to run to school. (The production design in “The Good Nurse” is impeccably accurate; Amy’s home is clean and cozy but cluttered just to the brink of being a disaster. You’d be able to discern a lot about the lives being lived here without meeting the inhabitants of the house.)
When Redmayne’s Charlie is hired to help out on the night shift, Amy is thrilled to have the help — and immediately impressed by Charlie’s acumen, experience and warmth. They become fast friends, with Charlie giving Amy rides home, helping her cope with her heart disease (she can’t tell her supervisors because she hasn’t been at the hospital long enough to qualify for insurance, and how’s that for an indictment of our health care system) and even bonding with Amy’s daughters. (This is one of those lean thrillers in which the protagonist doesn’t seem to have any family members or friends, and thus welcomes a newcomer into her life in a matter of weeks.)
Charlie seems a like a gift from God. It takes a long, slow build before Amy begins to realize he might actually be a monster from hell.
After an elderly patient dies unexpectedly, the hospital informs the police and the obligatory hard-nosed, world-weary detectives Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) are invited to investigate and question staffers — but only after the body has been cremated, and the hospital has conducted a weeks-long internal investigation of its own that found no wrongdoing. (Shocker.) The more Kim Dickens’ hospital administrator stonewalls the detectives, the more they’re convinced something doesn’t add up. Their attention focuses on Charlie, who has worked at several hospitals with an alarming number of sudden and suspicious patient deaths over the years — but time and again, the cops run into dead ends. Nobody at the administrative level wants to acknowledge even the possibility they were oblivious to one of their own staffers literally poisoning patients with lethal doses of unneeded medications.
As played by Redmayne (who employs an impressive American accent that makes him sound more than a little like Mark Ruffalo), Charlie has an awkward charm and an earnestness, but also a tendency to wallow in self-pity as he plays the victim to Amy, whether he’s complaining about his ex-wife not allowing him to see their children, or former co-workers hurting his career by viciously gossiping about him. It’s only after the police present Amy with their suspicions that Amy does some detective work of her own and comes to realize the man cooking dinner in her kitchen and playing with her daughters might well be one of the most prolific serial killers the world has ever known.
Redmayne infuses Charlie with a kind of Norman Bates-like creepiness; he’s polite and quiet and only slightly disturbing until he explodes into full-on madness. Still, we can understand why Charlie’s patients trusted him, and why Amy bought into his act. Chastain reminds us why she’s one of the best actors in the world as she disappears into the role of Amy, who is as “regular” a person as you’d ever meet, but also quite exceptional. Without the help of the Good Nurse, Charles Cullen’s reign of terror might have gone on even longer.
