Despite the misleading title, Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne’s new Netflix film isn’t a rom-com; rather, it’s a pared-down thriller that juggles numerous other genres.
Netflix’s The Good Nurse is an extraordinarily tense film that is best watched with as little prior knowledge as possible. It is a dramatic thriller with societal critique directed squarely at the people who praised healthcare personnel by pounding ‘thaalis’ in their honor on Janta curfew day.
As filmmaker Tobias Lindholm — making his English language debut following a trio of superb Danish dramas — finds subtle ways to tell a very familiar subject, Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne share top billing and produce performances worthy of Oscar nominations.
The Good Nurse not only elevates the police procedural genre, but it also approaches the disturbing true-crime narrative at its heart with amazing care.
The anticipation of how Lindholm and writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917, Last Night in Soho) will disrupt narrative cliches next is part of the enjoyment of watching the film — though ‘fun’ is hardly a suitable term to describe the type of injustice that it dourly dramatizes. After nearly an hour of behaving like a character study, The Good Nurse changes into something altogether different (and just as interesting) around the midway point.
Chastain portrays Amy, an overworked nurse who finds early in the film that she has a dangerous cardiac problem that must be treated right away. However, Amy, like millions of other Americans, lacks the essential insurance to afford her therapy. She gets slammed with a roughly $1000 charge for the consultation only moments after a doctor informs her that she must somehow live until she can be placed on the transplant list.
In these sequences, The Good Nurse resembles a prestige genre film about the white American working class, such as Out of the Furnace or The Place Beyond the Pines. Amy’s condition is critical, and the film’s outrage at her plight, and, by implication, the American healthcare system, is amplified by her obvious desire to assist others. But her responsibilities are lifted somewhat when Redmayne’s soft-spoken (is there any other sort of Redmayne character?) Charles Cullen arrives at her hospital as the new night shift nurse. He learns about her sickness early on and offers to assist and care for her while she waits for insurance coverage.
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The closeness they build throughout their constantly difficult evenings in the ICU is real, and the film’s immediate goal appears to be to bring Amy over the hump and to safety. But all changes when the hospital summons two detectives to engage in an internal inquiry into an elderly patient’s inexplicable death. When another patient, considerably younger, dies under identical circumstances, the investigators begin to think that something terrible is going on.
Wilson-Cairns’ screenplay’s controlled drip-feed of information is a significant factor for the film’s effectiveness as a suspense thriller.
Amy and the investigators are never one step ahead of the viewers. When they do, we learn something new. A weaker film — and, indeed, most Netflix true-crime documentaries — would have focused on the more sensational parts of this story. And there is potential for it. However, under Lindholm, who has uncovered human tales at the heart of a ticking time bomb thriller (A Hijacking) and a war film (A War), the strongest sequences in The Good Nurse are those in which Chastain and Redmayne are just talking.
It also helps that the direction is subdued. Except for a few scenes — one of which features Redmayne — The Good Nurse lacks the bombastic, scenery-chewing performances that one would generally associate with Oscar bait. Although the film does feature TikTok-friendly snippets for both Chastain and Redmayne in the case that they are nominated, their performances are generally rather restrained. Ice flows through the veins of this picture until it doesn’t.
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