Within the opening shot of “The Good Nurse,” a gradual, regular, unilluminating drip of a medical thriller, a serial killer in scrubs named Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) watches his sufferer die. The affected person has gone into convulsions, and Charles, the nurse who sounded the alarm, stands again because the medical doctors swoop in and check out in useless to save lots of the day. In a maybe inadvertently telling gesture, the digicam eases the struggling, flatlining affected person out of the body and creeps slowly towards Charles, whose inscrutable expression is supposed to relax you to the bone. It’s as if the murderous satisfaction he feels — and the anxious concern he’s making an attempt to venture — have in some way canceled one another out, leaving solely a curious, malevolent blankness.
Redmayne, an actor who tends to name consideration to his personal subtlety, works exhausting to make that blankness sinister. (The ominously pulsing rating composed by Biosphere tries even more durable.) It isn’t sinister, although; it’s tiresomely apparent. Even because the medical doctors reply to a code blue, the film throws up its personal “Uh-oh, maniac alert!” sign to the viewers, establishing Charles as a teasing enigma that can presumably be unraveled by story’s finish. Why did the real-life Cullen spend his 16-year nursing profession murdering affected person after affected person, injecting their IV luggage with deadly doses of insulin, digoxin and different medicines? (He confessed to killing 40 folks between 1988 and 2003; it’s estimated that the true quantity could have been as excessive as 400.)
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A fast scroll by Cullen’s Wikipedia web page turns up some potential clues: childhood bullying, a number of suicide makes an attempt, his dad and mom’ premature deaths. None of those particulars — or an early stint within the U.S. Navy, the place he was additional harassed and bullied — seem in Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ screenplay, which she tailored from Charles Graeber’s 2013 ebook, “The Good Nurse: A True Story of Drugs, Insanity, and Homicide.” For some time, that omission seems like the precise choice, born of a principled refusal to sentimentalize a killer or ascribe his actions to a tidy, handy set of motives. As a substitute, the director, Tobias Lindholm, retains Charles at a distance, easing him out and in of the story at key moments and drawing continuous consideration to his practiced bedside method and heat, solicitous smile.
It helps that once we first see Charles once more, after that clunker of a prologue, it’s by the welcoming eyes of a colleague, Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), who’s additionally based mostly on a real-life particular person. Chastain’s robust, unfussy efficiency conveys Amy’s skilled experience, tireless work ethic and unfeigned compassion for these beneath her care; she’s each inch the nice nurse of the title. She’s additionally a sufferer of the overwhelmed, underfunded healthcare system she works for: A single mother with a coronary heart situation that she doesn’t dare speak in confidence to her employers, Amy retains working her lengthy, hectic nights and ungodly hours, hoping she will maintain out for just some extra months till her medical insurance kicks in.
She’s grateful, then, when Charles joins her on her shifts, particularly when he finds out about her sickness and agrees to maintain it a secret. He turns into, in a way, her personal private caretaker, readily available to alleviate her workload and even babysit her two younger daughters (Devyn McDowell and Alix West Lefler). Even when they weren’t such instantly shut pals, Charles could be the final individual Amy would suspect of wrongdoing, even after a few of their sufferers start to die beneath mysterious circumstances. It's going to fall to 2 police detectives (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich, a properly environment friendly pair) to focus suspicion on Charles, who over the previous few years has labored at 9 totally different hospitals — none of that are prepared to talk about his employment, or concerning the equally suspicious deaths that occurred on his watch.
And so “The Good Nurse” turns into a bigger indictment of the ruthlessly capitalistic medical institution that, quite than confront its personal appreciable legal responsibility, shuttled Cullen from one hellish appointment to the subsequent. You could be reminded, as I used to be, of the Catholic Church’s well-documented sexual abuse cover-ups, its behavior of quietly relocating accused monks to new and unsuspecting parishes. You may also be reminded of films, like “Highlight,” that chronicled the unraveling of these conspiracies with a cool, methodical intelligence that “The Good Nurse” makes an attempt to match right here.
The Danish-born Lindholm, right here making his first English-language characteristic, got here to worldwide consideration along with his tense, restrained dramas “A Hijacking” and “A Battle.” (Extra just lately, he co-wrote Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning “One other Spherical” and directed the Danish crime sequence “The Investigation.”) He has a low-key visible strategy — together with a dim lighting scheme that implies the hospital is behind on its utility funds — and a pure really feel for procedural mechanics, like when he’s teasing out the main points of how Charles manages to govern the hospital’s Pyxis medication-dispensing machine.
To his credit score, Lindholm additionally acknowledges the human impression of the crimes, lingering particularly on two males devastated by the lack of their family members and decided to assist guarantee it doesn’t occur once more. In these moments, you get the sense, amplified by the title, that Lindholm is genuinely moved and even energized by goodness, which is why it’s simple to remain invested in Amy as she steadily realizes the extent of Charles’ crimes and turns into decided to cease them. What appears to mystify and even bore Lindholm, not less than on this occasion, is evil: He by no means will get a grip on Charles as a personality, and neither does Redmayne, whose insinuatingly friendly-creepy method provides solution to ludicrous interrogation-room histrionics within the closing stretch.
It’s price noting that “The Good Nurse” is being launched by Netflix, a frequent exploiter of the general public’s insatiable urge for food for true-crime narratives, as evidenced by numerous motion pictures and sequence together with its controversial latest hit “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” Partly due to the comparatively impersonal nature of Cullen’s crimes, a lot of which he dedicated with out even laying a hand on his victims, “The Good Nurse” operates at a extra tasteful take away. Admittedly, it’s a aid that the film retains the murders off-camera, that the worst offense we really see Charles commit, actually, is the crime of clinginess. What it isn’t is very insightful or memorable. Simply because evil is banal doesn’t imply a film needs to be.
‘The Good Nurse’
Rated: R, for language
Working time: 2 hours, 1 minute
Taking part in: Los Feliz Theater, Los Angeles; Bay Theatre, Pacific Palisades; begins streaming Oct. 26 on Netflix
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