A dramatic thriller with social commentary aimed instantly on the individuals who thanked healthcare suppliers by banging ‘thaalis’ of their honour on janta curfew day, Netflix‘s The Good Nurse is an unusually taut movie that’s greatest loved with as little prior info as attainable.
Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne share top-billing and ship performances worthy of the Oscars of their cupboards as director Tobias Lindholm — making his English language debut after a trio of wonderful Danish dramas — finds nuanced methods to inform a reasonably acquainted story. Not solely does The Good Nurse supply an elevated tackle the police procedural style, it additionally treats the eerie true-crime story at its centre with outstanding restraint.
A part of the enjoyable in watching the film — though ‘enjoyable’ is hardly an applicable phrase to explain the sort of injustice that it dourly dramatises — is questioning how Linholm and author Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917, Final Evening in Soho) will subvert narrative tropes subsequent. After behaving like a personality research for about an hour, The Good Nurse transforms into one thing totally totally different (and simply as participating) across the midway mark.
Chastain performs an overworked nurse named Amy, who discovers early within the movie that she has a severe coronary heart situation that must be addressed instantly. However Amy, like so many thousands and thousands of People, doesn’t have the mandatory insurance coverage to cowl her therapy. Moments after a health care provider tells her that she has to in some way survive until she will make it to the transplant record, she is slapped with a invoice of almost $1000 for the session.
It’s in these scenes that The Good Nurse capabilities like a kind of status style films concerning the white American working class, like Out of the Furnace or The Place Past the Pines. Amy’s situation is grave, and the movie’s anger at her scenario, and, by extension the American healthcare system, is made all of the extra impactful due to her seen dedication to serving to others. However her burdens ease significantly when Redmayne’s soft-spoken (is there another sort of Redmayne character?) Charles Cullen exhibits up as the brand new night time shift nurse at her hospital. He learns about her sickness fairly early on, and gives to assist take care of her as she buys time earlier than she is eligible for insurance coverage.
The bond that they kind over endlessly demanding nights within the ICU is real, and the movie’s speedy goal, it appears, is to get Amy over the hump and to security. However the whole lot is turned on its head when two detectives are summoned by the hospital to take part in an inner investigation into an aged affected person’s mysterious loss of life. And when one other affected person — this one is way youthful — dies underneath related circumstances, the detectives start to suspect that one thing sinister is afoot.
The managed drip-feed of knowledge that Wilson-Cairns’ screenplay dispenses is a big motive behind the movie’s success as a suspense thriller. The viewers isn’t one step forward of Amy, and even the detectives. We uncover new particulars after they do. A lesser movie — and certainly, most Netflix true-crime documentaries — would’ve probably leaned into the extra salacious features of this story. And there’s alternative for that. However underneath Lindholm, who beforehand discovered the human tales on the centre of a ticking time-bomb thriller (A Hijacking) and a warfare film (A Battle), one of the best scenes in The Good Nurse are those the place it’s simply Chastain and Redmayne, having a dialog.
It helps that the course may be very understated. Barring a few moments — you’ll recognise considered one of them that includes Redmayne instantly — The Good Nurse has not one of the loud, surroundings chewing performances that one would usually affiliate with Oscar-bait akin to this. Though admittedly, the movie preemptively offers each Chastain and Redmayne with TikTok-friendly clips within the occasion that they’re nominated, however their performances in any other case are surprisingly reigned in. Ice runs by means of this movie’s veins, till it doesn’t.
One would think about that the idea of spoilers, and the unfair act of unveiling them, is restricted to movies that belong to the superhero style. Nevertheless it can’t be pressured how a lot of a distinction watching The Good Nurse with out having consumed the trailers and different advertising and marketing materials makes.
The Good Nurse
Director – Tobias Lindholm
Solid – Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne, Noah Emmerich, Nnamdi Asomugha
Score – 4/5