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‘The Good Nurse’ Review: Bad Medicine

This true-crime tale, starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, dramatizes the story of Charles Cullen, a nurse who was discovered to be a serial killer.

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By Amy Nicholson

No one knows how many patients Charles Cullen murdered in his career as a hospital nurse. Cullen confessed to 29 intentional deaths ; some experts speculate the actual count may be as high as 400. Why poison the people entrusted to his care? Cullen, currently serving multiple life sentences at New Jersey State Prison, has yet to share his motives, and “The Good Nurse,” a grim feel-bad drama by the director Tobias Lindholm (a co-writer of the feel-good Oscar winner “Another Round”) isn’t interested in scrounging up a guess. When the film’s Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne, tries to explain himself, Lindholm muffles his voice with a police siren and wailing violins.

Instead, Lindholm and the scriptwriter, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, set out to answer a more fundamental question: how did Cullen get away with it for 16 years across nine different hospitals? Were his employers too strapped for resources and personnel to notice — or were they so scared of lawsuits that they selfishly pushed out Cullen to become another community’s problem without so much as a single bad letter of reference, let alone a call to outside authorities?

The movie implies the latter. Lindholm and Wilson-Cairns, who were both raised in countries with nationalized health care, view the United States medical system as a business centered on having patients, not helping them. They’ve fictionalized the names of the hospitals, as well as the names of the dead, to give themselves leeway to reconstruct Cullen’s last place of work as a house of horrors shot in such dingy, dungeon-y grays by the cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes that Dr. Frankenstein would fit right in.

Nearly every scene is an indignity: corpses left neglected in beds, loved ones grieving next to the sickly glow of a vending machine, managers haranguing their exhausted staff about the cost of coffee filters. Even the story’s heroine, a nurse named Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) who provides the only empathy in this miserable tale, is also one of its victims. The single mother of two is tirelessly devoted to her patients despite a heart condition that puts her at high risk for a stroke. Yet her own hospital won’t provide her with health insurance until she’s worked there for a year, a common plight for contract workers that Lindholm sees as a moral affront that falls somewhere between bitter irony and indentured servitude.

There’s a touch of Gogol-esque satire in a subplot in which two investigating detectives (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich) are thwarted by hospital bureaucrats who downplay deaths as “unexplainable incidents,” in the words of a chillingly placid risk manager (Kim Dickens), and, when low on excuses, put the cops on hold with punishing Muzak. Similarly, while Redmayne mostly plays his murderer at a low hum, he allows himself one scene to unleash his big mime energy, theatrically gasping and twitching and letting his long fingers crawl over his face. The moment is reminiscent of Anthony Perkins at the end of “Psycho,” but “The Good Nurse” offers no assurances that its danger is safely locked away. In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.

The Good Nurse Rated R for language. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix .

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The Good Nurse review: The call is coming from inside the ER

Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain play two nurses on very different sides of the first-do-no-harm coin in a cagey, compelling true-life mystery.

If biology really is destiny, Eddie Redmayne 's face makes a fantastic case for innocence: The man is a marble faun, a freckled daisy, a milky shard of English porcelain so delicate and winsome he couldn't possibly be anything but blameless. That disconnect brings a great, discomfiting tension to The Good Nurse , a methodical and smartly wrought psychological thriller that plays in limited release this week before arriving on Netflix Oct. 26.

Redmayne plays the real-life intensive-care nurse Charles Cullen, whose notorious story is easy enough to Google, though refreshing the details is hardly a prerequisite; it's enough to know that in 2002 he landed at the same New Jersey hospital as a fellow nurse named Amy Loughren ( Jessica Chastain ), working nights on the emergency ward. Amy is the kind of R.N. who treats bedside manner as at least half the job; she's unfailingly kind and cheerful, and conscientious to a fault. She's also got two little girls at home she hardly gets to see — their dad, neither seen nor identified, is a non-factor — and a serious heart condition she can't reveal to her employers or even treat until her insurance kicks in several months down the road.

Enter Charles, the dream coworker: Amiable, empathetic, and eager to help, he materializes at Parkfield Memorial like a gift from the night-shift gods, immediately leaning in to carry the load of his overextended coworkers. Soon Charles and Amy's easy rapport has spilled over from carpooling and shared midnight meals to a sort of quasi family life with her daughters at home, though their friendship remains strictly platonic; he's still dealing with the afterburn of an ugly divorce, and unsteady custody of two girls of his own. But isn't it strange that so many patients in the hospital's care — an elderly woman with a hardly life-threatening skin condition, a seemingly healthy new mom — keep coding out and dying?

A pair of local police officers (Nnamdi Asomugha and The Americans ' Noah Emmerich ) are brought in to investigate one of those incidents, though their presence is treated mostly as a pesky formality: Parkfield executives have already conducted their own internal review, and seem oddly resistant to supplying any kind of documentation, or even a body. ( Fear the Walking Dead 's Kim Dickens , her blooming panic barely contained beneath a placid middle-management exterior, makes for a canny model of queasy corporate fealty á la Michael Clayton -era Tilda Swinton .) Chastain, tremulous yet determined, brings something gratifyingly grounded to her everywoman hero, and an eerie, pitch-perfect Redmayne, wearing Charlie's nice-guy drag like a battering ram, lets his mask slip so incrementally that the final scenes feel like a true terrifying rupture.

Danish director Tobias Lindholm ( A War ), working from a lean, unfussy script by 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns , shapes his story like an elevated docudrama, nimbly drawing out the thriller elements even as he settles comfortably into the small domestic details of Amy's world, and the more traditional cop-procedural overtones of Asomugha and Emmerich's stymied efforts to further their case. It feels like a faint insult to say that The Good Nurse could be a premium-cable product from long ago, one of those lightly prestige-y Sunday-night movies Showtime or HBO used to make. But it's also one crafted with sturdy, consummate skill, burnished by two Oscar winners who don't stint on their performances just because most people will end up seeing Nurse on a small screen. And when, exactly, did that kind of filmmaking stop being more than good enough? Grade: B+

The Good Nurse Is a True-Crime Story Dressed Up with a Classy Sheen

F ew places inspire more anxiety and vulnerability than hospitals, which makes the idea of a serial killer prowling the corridors especially unnerving—especially if the killer is a nurse. That’s the dramatic gamble of The Good Nurse, based on the story of Charles Cullen, currently serving multiple life sentences for murdering at least 29 patients across New Jersey and Pennsylvania between 1988 and 2003. Eddie Redmayne plays Cullen: in the first scene, he stands back and watches blankly as doctors tend to a patient who’s flatlined. Bad eggs don’t come much worse than this.

Later, having jumped to another hospital, he befriends fellow nurse Amy Loughren ( Jessica Chastain ), a single mom with two small kids and a heart condition that will require surgery, if it doesn’t kill her first. And having started her job only recently, she’s still a few months away from getting health insurance. She finds an ally in Charles, who radiates false kindness as only a truly insidious serial killer can.

Directed by Tobias Lindholm (whose credits include the 2012 pirate drama A Highjacking ) and adapted by Krysty Wilson-Cairns from Charles Graeber’s book, The Good Nurse is tense, all right, sometimes to the reaches of unpleasantness, but mostly just to the point of boredom. Though it works hard to make us believe it’s really a social statement about hospitals’ lack of scruples —pay close attention to that hospital risk manager, played by Kim Dickens, who takes great pains to cover up deaths that happen on her watch—its garden-variety true-crime roots are painfully visible. People enjoy true crime for lots of reasons, but we could all stand to be a little more honest about the reality that these stories stem from real-life human suffering . The Good Nurse has a classy, polished luster—it virtually sighs “prestige,” without being so gauche as to spell it out. But in the end, it’s still just a serial-killer procedural, played out for our delectation.

Read more: The 16 Best True Crime Books of All Time

Redmayne is fine as bad nurse Charles, until he starts twitching and overemoting in the finale—the kind of overkill that’s more a director’s fault than an actor’s. Chastain is the movie’s saving grace: she’s not playing a pushover but a woman who desperately needs kindness and accepts it when it’s offered, even if it’s fraudulent. She sees Charles as a human being, which means she feels a sharp sense of loss when she discovers the truth about him. Chastain renders every emotional shift in muted tones. She’s the movie’s pulse, a vibration that registers even amid the bedpan clatter of its dressed-up tawdriness.