The Good Nurse Review: Jessica Chastain Defeats Eddie Redmayne in Chilly True Life Drama

In the fall of 2003, a new nurse arrived at a quiet hospital in central New Jersey. He was mild-mannered and easy-going, with an impressive record of previous performances. His name was Charles Cullen. Call him Charlie. He quickly became friends with fellow sister Amy Loughren, who was also good at her job and kind to those who came into her orbit. Both were hiding secrets: Amy had recently learned that she was suffering from an illness that required a heart transplant, one she couldn’t afford until she’d finished six months in the hospital at her new gig (that’s, of course, when her medical performance shot in); Charlie was a serial killer.

What happened when Amy met Charlie, then discovered his terrible secret and helped bring him to justice, is well dramatized in Tobias Lindholm’s suitably chilling The Good Nurse. Based on Charles Graeber’s book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder and meticulously adapted by 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Lindholm’s take on serial killer procedural drama keeps everyone in suspense of his twisted killer to the woman who eventually kept him and even the audience themselves at bay. It’s a perfect fit for the Danish filmmaker behind similarly cold-blooded dramas like A War and A Highjacking, who develops a sense of uneasiness from the film’s opening moments and never quite gives in.

Originally set in Pennsylvania in 1996, The Good Nurse follows Charlie (Eddie Redmayne) in his favorite habitat: a drab hospital where a patient is dying in front of him. As the pressure mounts and Charlie carefully steps out of the way, all sloping shoulders and intent attention, cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes pushes in closer and closer. Even when the patient dies and the rest of the hospital staff falter, Charlie doesn’t flinch. The audience, on the other hand, will.

Seven years later, Charlie gets a new job at another hospital that is short on budgets and is in desperate need of good help. Nurse Amy Loughren (a perfectly calibrated Jessica Chastain) is wonderful at her job, but it’s taken a great toll on her, both physically (we’ll soon learn more about the illness that keeps her breathless and always terrified) and emotionally ( a single mom, Amy is constantly scraping by just to keep her two cute daughters in sneakers and under one roof). Charlie appears to be a godsend, someone who is not only capable of nurturing but genuinely cares about the lives of Amy and her girls. They bond instantly and within a few weeks it’s like Charlie has always been a part of Amy’s life.

There’s so much she doesn’t know. But she will find out.

JoJo Whilden / Netflix

While Graeber’s book covered much of the case, the author spent considerable pages detailing Cullen’s real-life biography, attempting to unravel his pathology, and even delving into the broken nature of America’s hospital system itself, but Wilson-Cairns focuses on Amy’s life as the emotional center of the story, basing this nightmare on something very real. Her script also features a handful of Cullen’s victims (now estimated to number over 300) who enter Amy’s orbit and eventually come into contact with Charlie. With so many victims, it would be impossible to include even a fraction of them all, but Wilson-Cairns spends quality time with two women who are ultimately killed by Charlie’s nefarious techniques, but only after Amy (and the audience) have gotten them to know.

These choices provide emotional baggage for what’s to come, driving Chastain to deliver effective performance in a very quiet package. While the stakes in bringing Charlie to justice extend well beyond Amy and her family, the fixation on Amy, a naturally likeable character, adds the necessary emotion, especially as The Good Nurse moves into more procedural territory.

After a death, two local police officers (Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha, both solid) are assigned to investigate, despite the hospital and its chief administrator (a steely Kim Dickens) giving them precious little to work with. But as they work this strange case, Amy also begins to wonder what’s really going on with her good friend Charlie, and as the trio come together to solve the mystery and murders, “The Good Nurse” further breaks the focus , culminating in a goosebumps showdown in which Chastain finally reveals her full power and Redmayne doesn’t flinch.

If you’re looking for reasons why Charlie did what he did, you won’t find them in The Good Nurse. (Netflix will release the film in October, and a month later the streamer will also release a related documentary, “Capturing the Killer Nurse,” which may offer more insight.) That’s no slap against the film, which is boldly not Case Is Try to put everything into a neat package, mainly because a) it was like that in real life, since Cullen has never tried to explain his actions, and b) it speaks to the low-key nature of Lindholm’s latest . It may leave some viewers cold, but it really should chill them to the bone.

grade B-

The Good Nurse premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in select theaters on Friday, October 19 and streaming on Friday, October 26.

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