The Good Nurse

by Julian Spivey

Photo: Netflix

Director: Tobias Lindholm
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne & Nnamdi Asomugha 
Rated: R
Runtime: 2 hours & 1 minute

“The Good Nurse,” the American directorial debut from Tobias Lindholm, is a by-the-numbers telling of one of the worst serial killers in world history that seemingly few know and the co-worker that helped to take him down.

Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) is a compassionate nurse working in an intensive care unit at Parkfield Memorial Hospital in New Jersey in 2003. She’s struggling to make ends meet as a working single mother of two girls, who also has a potentially deadly heart malfunction that she’s trying to manage while being months away from qualifying for health insurance needed for a heart transplant.

Amy is befriended by the new nurse on her unit, Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) and the two quickly become close friends. Soon after Charlie begins working at the hospital an elderly patient who seemed likely to recover from her ailment dies suddenly. After a many-week internal investigation, the hospital administration contacts state police about the death, but the hospital doesn’t seem to want to help in any way with the investigation, which pisses off the detectives on the case, Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich).

The two detectives believe Charlie to be suspicious because of his previous criminal history (though it’s a leap they make in the movie – surely there was more to their suspicions in real life?) and are certain there was foul play involved in the elderly patient’s death when Amy looks at the patient’s medication list and realizes something deadly wrong took place. She doesn’t believe Charlie could be involved.

When more patients begin to die mysteriously she realizes something nefarious is going on when insulin keeps showing up as having been administered to them. She has a meeting with a former co-worker who once worked with Charlie at a different hospital and realizes the same mysterious deaths were happening there until he left. She checks the storage room for IV bags and realizes some have been messed with.

She helps the detectives attempt to get Charlie to confess to his crimes, which has mixed results at first but finally succeeds.

“The Good Nurse” is a good movie with good performances from Oscar-winners Chastain and Redmayne.

However, it has the feeling of a film that should’ve been better than it wound up being. It’s an interesting story. The two lead actors are incredibly good at what they do and certainly adequate here. There just simply wasn’t much oomph to the film and that has to lie at the feet of Lindholm and screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who based her script off Charles Graeber’s book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder.

I wanted more from “The Good Nurse.” More as to why Charlie Cullen commits these crimes. Maybe there just wasn’t a particularly good explanation. Having done some research post-watching the film that seems to be a lot of the case. The man killed a confirmed 29 patients, but potentially as many as 400 during his career as a nurse but has never really given a sound motive as to why.

“The Good Nurse” is streaming on Netflix.