The Good Nurse (2022) poster

The Good Nurse (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Director – Tobias Lindholm, Screenplay – Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Based on the Book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder by Charles Graeber, Producers – Darren Aronofsky, Scott Franklin & Michael A. Jackman, Photography – Jody Lee Lipes, Music – Biosphere, Visual Effects – Fin Design + Effects & Orca Studios (Supervisors – Lionel Estivill & Adrian Pueyo), Special Effects Supervisor – Dustin Riedman, Production Design – Shane Valentino. Production Company – Protozoa Pictures/Filmnation Entertainment.

Cast

Jessica Chastain (Amy Loughren), Eddie Redmayne (Charlie Cullen), Noah Emmerich (Detective Tim Braun), Nnamdi Asomugha (Detective Danny Baldwin), Kim Dickens (Linda Garan), Malik Yoba (Captain Sam Johnson), Devyn McDowell (Maya Loughren), Alix West Laufler (Alex Loughren), Marcia Jean Kurtz (Jackie), Judith Delgado (Ana Martinez)


Plot

In 2003, Amy Loughren is working as a nurse at Parkfield Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. She is struggling to raise two children as a solo parent, while keeping her heart issues a secret from the hospital until she can wait out the four months she needs for her medical insurance to kick in. She befriends Charlie Cullen, a new nurse on the job. After he sees her struggling, she confides her secret to him and he promises to help. They become good friends and he bonds with her children. At the same time, Parkfield officials are forced to make a routine report to police about the possibly suspicious death of a patient. However, as the two investigating detectives find, the hospital is being guarded about the information they release and are hiding many details behind patient confidentiality. Amy unwittingly tips the detectives off and they team up and begin searching further, finding other similar deaths. As Amy uncovers more evidence, things lead back to Charlie who has been injecting IV bags with insulin and other drugs, causing patients to be slowly killed. The detectives try to build a case against Charlie despite the official obstacles in the way.


This is a film based on the life of serial killer Charlie Cullen. Cullen was a nurse working in New Jersey. Beginning sometime in the late 1980s, Cullen began injecting the IV drip bags of patients with drugs like insulin and digoxin. In 2003, nurse Amy Loughren pieced together evidence that helped convict Cullen. As part of his plea agreement for a life sentence instead of the death sentence, Cullen pled guilty to thirteen counts of murder and two of attempted murder. It is known for certain that he killed 29 victims but the number is believed to run possibly as high as 400. He is sentenced to eleven consecutive life sentences and is jailed until 2388.

The film comes from Danish director Tobias Lindholm, known for non-genre works like R (2010), A Hijacking (2012) and A War (2015), as well as script work on other internationally acclaimed works such as the tv series Borgen (2010-22), April 9 (2015) and Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (2020). The film is produced by Darren Aronofsky and his Protozoa Pictures production company.

The story focuses on the real-life character of Amy Loughren – if you do a Google search, there are a number of on-set and film premiere photographs of her and Jessica Chastain meeting. The film is adapted from the non-fiction book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder (2013) by journalist Charles Graeber, which was expanded out from an article Graeber wrote for New York magazine in 2007.

Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) and Amy Luoghren (Jessica Chastain) in The Good Nurse (2022)
Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) and Amy Luoghren (Jessica Chastain)

I cover a number of works about true-life serial killers under the heading True Crime. Unlike most of the other works listed there, The Good Nurse is not a work of horror focused on the serial killer or one that delves into their mindset or re-enacts their crimes. The point-of-view figure throughout becomes Amy Loughren and, as such, the story is not dissimilar to an Erin Brockovich (2000) in that it is focused on her real-life efforts to break open and expose a great crime up against a wall of official cover-up and denial.

Tobias Lindholm takes a tone of sombre realism. This is not a film invested in big dramatics but the slow procedure of people building a case and obtaining evidence –you have few doubts that that is the way that things happened in actuality. It becomes a work that eventually is quite damning of the failings of the US medical system – how medical health companies willingly cover up evidence of malfeasance under an umbrella of legalese, which law enforcement seem powerless to do anything about, or simply the sight of Jessica Chastain’s Amy struggling to keep going on the job despite health issues because she has no health insurance coverage.

Jessica Chastain has built up a body of solid and reliable work in fairly much everything she does, Here she invests what could easily otherwise be an anonymous character with great passion and feeling. Eddie Redmayne is an actor who has emerged to awards acclaim in recent years alongside the box-office appeal of the Fantastic Beasts films. It is something different here to see him playing a regular character, someone who patiently impresses with just being a nice guy for most of the film. However, the film reserves the powerhouse acting for the interrogation scene that comes near the end where both he and Jessica Chastain go all out resulting in some fantastic dramatics.


Trailer here


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