The Good Nurse

 4/4

Starring: Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne, Noah Emmerich, Nnamdi Asomugha, Kim Dickens, Devin McDowell, Alex West Lefler

Rated R for Language

It was an uncanny move for Netflix to release "The Good Nurse" in October.  Although it's not a horror film, there is no denying that it's genuinely chilling and unsettling.  It's going to be a long time before I can walk into a hospital and feel completely safe.

Amy Loughren (Chastain) is a hardworking nurse at Parkfield Memorial Hospital.  Actually, Amy shouldn't be working; she has a heart condition and in desperate need of a transplant, but she has two kids and hasn't worked at Parkfield long enough to receive health insurance.  This is also why she keeps her condition a secret lest the hospital find out and fire her.  Help comes her way when a new nurse arrives in the ICU ward where she works.  His name is Charlie Cullen (Redmayne) and he meshes with Amy almost immediately.  He's smart enough to pick up on Amy's health troubles and agrees to help her.

Soon after Charlie arrives, a patient named Ana Martinez (Judith Delgado) mysteriously dies.  The health department demands that the police be aware of the death, so detectives Tim Braun (Emmerich) and Danny Baldwin (Asomugha) arrive to investisgate.  Linda Garren (Dickens), Parkland's risk manager, informs them that there is nothing to the incident, but Braun isn't convinced.  He starts sniffing around, and discovers that Charlie has switched hospitals regularly, leaving disturbing rumors in his wake.

Director Tobias Lindholm, making his English language debut, doesn't amp up the suspense or highlight clues.  He doesn't need to.  The concept of a nurse who is secretly a serial killer is terrifying enough, and Lindholm's pokerfaced approach makes the horror of the situation much clearer.  Like in "Grave of the Fireflies," "The Good Nurse" generates its effect with is lack of traditional filmmaking tropes.  There are no races against time, close calls (well there is one, but it's a different kind), or any of that.  It's played as close to the bone as possible.

Acting in a movie like this is easy to overlook, but that doesn't make it any less effective.  Jessica Chastain is like Cate Blanchett or Meryl Streep; you really can't go wrong when you cast her.  Chastain plays Amy as a normal woman, not as a "character."  She does her job the best she can, but being a single mom with a heart condition that makes every second a liability wears on her.  Having someone as caring and helpful as Charlie around seems like a gift from the gods.  Then she finds out that he has a dark side.

For his part, Eddie Redmayne plays Charlie as an affable everyman.  He doesn't threaten or blackmail Amy, principally because he doesn't know that she is on to him (or anyone else for that matter).  He does care for Amy and her girls and is always willing to help her.  The idea that Charlie can be so devoted to Amy and yet commit these monstrous crimes is frightening to contemplate.  His lack of emotion about the devastation he causes makes him even scarier.

"The Good Nurse" is largely understated and cerebral.  It doesn't have an ounce of gore or action, but that doesn't mean it isn't violent.  By not showing Charlie committing his crimes, Lindholm forces us to imagine them.  Likewise, he's the only one at Parkfield who knows the truth about Amy's condition.  It's never explicitly stated, but the fact that he holds a significant trump card on her is not lost to her or us.  Charlie's threat remains abstract, and that makes him more than a traditional movie killer.  We see not what he does but the consequences of them, and so his actions aren't exploited for thrills or to "understand" him (Cullen never revealed the motive for his crimes.

One thing that Lindholm does do is explore how Charlie was able to get away with it for so long.  The hospitals he worked at knew what he was doing, but they covered it up to save their own asses.  "He's gone," they seem to say, "let someone else deal with the fallout."  Here too, Lindholm makes the correct choice.  He doesn't shake his fist in indignation; he knows that the implications of passing the buck to avoid scandal are an outrage on their own.  And anyway, he has a person do that for him.  Parkland's risk manager Linda Garren (Dickens) is a former nurse (and therefore had to know what Charlie was doing) but still stonewalls the detectives at every turn.  Kim Dickens is very good in the role, hiding her actions without malice.  She's come a long way from her hideous turn in "Hollow Man."

"The Good Nurse" is thinking person's thriller, which is a rare thing indeed.  It's not that it is dense like "Michael Clayton," for example, but that it makes us consider what's going on behind the words and actions of the characters involved.  Everyone here (except Charlie) knows the score, and it's something that few are willing to confront.  How could they?

This is one of the year's very best.  When I create my Top 10 list, "The Good Nurse" is sure to rank very high.  Don't miss it!