The true-crime case of Charlie Cullen is familiar to many – particularly those from the United States. And even if you don't know the specifics, it's likely you've heard a story about someone similar: a nurse who abandons the tenets they have sworn to uphold and kills their patients.
This familiarity is what the Netflix film The Good Nurse has to overcome, and by choosing not to withhold the thing we know — that Charlie Cullen is a killer — The Good Nurse manages to forge an undercurrent of genuine suspense that has less to do with his victims and more to do with his friendship with Amy Loughren, the woman who would be his undoing.
Starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, The Good Nurse is not short of star power. Both actors are familiar with playing real-life people and approach their roles with a sense of duty not only to the real people but also to the story at hand.
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From his first hunched-shouldered, shuffling footsteps, it's clear that Redmayne has chosen a particular vein in which to play Charlie — one of self-deprecation and relative anonymity. In this role, Redmayne makes use of his particular style of acting, a sort of sheepishness that borders into aggressiveness.
It suits the character, but it's also hard to forget sometimes that you're watching Redmayne himself. He's less chameleonic than other actors, but it's also easy to imagine that the real Charlie Cullen was exactly how Redmayne portrayed him.
Chastain is also one of those actors who stands out in her roles, and while it isn't a disservice to The Good Nurse, that quality does make it harder to let yourself be transported into the story.
Strangely enough, the times when it's easiest to allow yourself to forget about the actors is when Redmayne and Chastain share scenes with easy-going camaraderie. You can feel the friendship building between them, all the while knowing that it's only going to end in tears.
The Good Nurse also eschews the typical 'true story' formula of other films like Spotlight in which the uncovering and understanding of the evidence is part of the dramatic unfolding. In The Good Nurse, the evidence is straightforward and relatively easy to understand – there's no needle to find in a haystack, no breadcrumbs to follow.
Strangely enough, the true villain of The Good Nurse is capitalism. Detectives Baldwin and Braun (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich respectively) come up against hospital boards who have covered for Cullen again and again, all to save themselves the reputational and financial ruin that admitting their liability might bring.
Meanwhile, Loughren is hanging on by a thread to her night-nurse job – and her life – so she can get healthcare and finally address her congestive heart failure.
Cullen's support of Loughren is supremely ironic, and perhaps a film with a clearer vision might have been able to make this deadly irony the backbone of its story. The Good Nurse tries to straddle the line between intimate thriller biopic and grand societal commentary in a way that doesn't quite succeed either way.
Still, if you like true crime and enjoy watching Actors Acting, The Good Nurse is a slow-burning, well-crafted film. Its stand-out characteristic is its sound design, which draws parallels between prisons and hospitals, and the way in which hospital boards become not only jailers but murderers themselves.
The Good Nurse is available to watch now on Netflix.
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