by Robert Bouffard, Editor
With true crime media seemingly hitting a fever pitch with the release of and discourse surrounding Netflix’s Dahmer, it might not seem like the best time for the same platform to release another piece of media (this time a movie) about all the murders a real life killer got away with. On one hand, it’s great that The Good Nurse isn’t another movie that portrays a serial killer as a charming guy who lures his victims with his dashing good looks; but on the other hand, it’s a misfire in a lot of different ways.
You’d think a movie about a nurse, Charlie (Eddie Redmayne), who killed an estimated 400 patients at nine different hospitals by injecting insulin into their saline would make for an engaging movie. And it does… for about half the runtime. We learn that all these hospitals knew what he was doing, but the most they did to stop him was fire him, just so he could go to another hospital and do it all over again. It has all the right ingredients for Mark Ruffalo yelling, “THEY KNEW!” at the top of his lungs. But The Good Nurse opts to focus on Charlie’s relationship with fellow nurse, Amy (Jessica Chastain), instead.
Amy is a compelling enough character; she has a heart condition that requires a transplant, but she can’t get the surgery until her insurance kicks in four months down the road. But just like the implications of the hospitals’ liability, the film pretty much abandons the ticking clock of Amy’s heart. Abandoning your most compelling and worthwhile storylines in favor of the trite “daughter wishes her mom was home more” storyline is a bad move, in my humble opinion. And when that and the relationship between Amy and Charlie resolve with a whimper, you find yourself wishing for a lot more.
Thankfully, there are four performances that make The Good Nurse at least watchable. Eddie Redmayne gets a lot of hate (a lot of which is warranted), but he’s undeniably excellent in this film. There’s a latent darkness to his character which doesn’t quite cross the line into sociopathic. He plays the mystery well, all while avoiding the Bundy-ification and skirting that awkward, jittery demeanor he’s all but patented. Chastain, meanwhile, is unsurprisingly great. In a total reversal from her Oscar-winning performance in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, most of her performance is internal and more akin to Zero Dark Thirty or Interstellar than the flashy televangelist.
Noah Emmerich and former NFL star Nnamdi Asomugha play your typical duo of detectives, but thankfully their performances are better than typical. Asomugha in particular is a standout, and not just because he’s a former athlete. His reservedness makes his moments of outward emotion hit that much harder.
These four actors — particularly the former Oscar winners in Redmayne and Chastain — must have seen something in this script to make them sign on. Maybe it was director Tobias Lindholm, director of multiple episodes of Mindhunter and writer of 2021’s Best International Feature Film, Another Round. Whatever it was they saw, though, was a false hope. The Good Nurse could have been this year’s Spotlight, but instead it revealed that this story, while important, just might not have been cinematic. You could make the argument that it’s because this is how the real story played out, but then you’re faced with the tough thought: maybe it’s just not worth making into a movie at all.
Score: 5/10
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