Directed By Tobias Lindholm

Starring – Eddie Redmayne, Jessica Chastain, Noah Emmerich

The Plot – Amy (Chastain), a compassionate nurse and single mother struggling with a life-threatening heart condition, is stretched to her physical and emotional limits by the hard and demanding night shifts at the ICU. But help arrives when Charlie (Redmayne), a thoughtful and empathetic fellow nurse, starts at her unit. While sharing long nights at the hospital, the two develop a strong and devoted friendship, and for the first time in years, Amy truly has faith in her and her young daughters’ future. But after a series of mysterious patient deaths sets off an investigation that points to Charlie as the prime suspect, Amy is forced to risk her life and the safety of her children to uncover the truth.

Rated R for adult language

The Good Nurse | Official Trailer | Netflix – YouTube

POSITIVES

At its best, “The Good Nurse” is an insightful dissection of the medical field, primarily through the eyes of nurses, with all of the responsibilities and consequences in a thankless job. It’s one of those films that not only outlines the respect that such pivotal members of society deserve, for the selflessness and time given to patients with no guarantee of survival, but also vividly conveys the sleeplessness and dreaded disposition of a career where nothing is guaranteed. In illustrating such, Lindholm has certainly done his homework in conjuring as much about the career as any film about nursing ever has, but beyond that with the alluring social commentary of Krysty Wilson-Cairns script, fleshes out the kind of audacious reality for them that establishes each day as being a battle of wills, whether in the grueling circumstances of continuously losing those you’ve grown closest to, or even the headaches of behind the scenes politics with the nameless faceless manipulators of management, with their own deviously hidden agendas. It’s a compelling narrative in this regard, and one that never required the structure or genre capacities of a designation to sell its impact, instead feeling like an honest slice of life that transcended the fictional encompassing, despite the familiarity of two of the biggest movie stars caught in its crosshairs. For the performances, the work of Redmayne and especially Chastain are impeccable, taking an inconsistent script with floundering dialogue, and making something substantially endearing to these respective characters. Redmayne obviously gets to explore the murky depths of his character more, with the benefits of an evolution that affords him the kind of unsettling ambiguity with the character, but for my money it’s Jessica that is the primary show-stealer, embodying Amy with a touch of warmth and restlessness that is the best for her patients, while being the worst for her own mental frailty. The technical capacities exude a sleekly sterile presentation that emits the loneliness of the job’s many isolation factors, and the production itself garners a subtlety in make-up design that not only weathers the likeness and familiarities of our duo of leads, but in Jessica’s case provides emphasis to the internal struggle that weathers her physically and shatters her emotionally with the requirement to do it all again, day after day.

NEGATIVES

How often is it that in a true story film that the factual aspects of the story are the weakest element about it? Part of this problem certainly stems from the case of Charlie Cullen being so ambiguous even twenty-five years after the events in the film, with so little factually known about it to draw compelling answers from, but the bigger problem pertains to the twist itself, which resonates with the kind of impact as a papercut with gloves on the victim. Not only does the conflict attain no thrills or even momentary urgency spun from the arrival of this strangely surreal shift in direction, but at times it doesn’t even feel like the same film, with laughable dialogue and unearned motivations wiping away the humanity from the characters and conflict during the film’s inferior second half. The banal blundering completely wipes away the vulnerability of the investigation, even so much as undercutting the importance of the duo of detective leads once Amy begins to investigate for herself, and the entertainment factor of such goes up in smoke once this supposedly terrifying reality comes to a resolution a whole fifteen minutes after it was surmised. In addition to this, I found the film’s lack of exploration in the obvious corruption of the hospital to be most disconcerting, especially with a two-hour run time with all of the availability of fleshing out something daring and unique. Because it becomes such a compelling aspect of the film’s first act, you sort of just expect that it will materialize into something riveting during the film’s climax, but because it refuses to explore multiple themes simultaneously, it doesn’t come to fruition, instead leaving us longing for the film that might’ve been in the boundaries of unnecessary padding. Finally, while most of the film’s technical qualities can be appreciated in small doses, the musical score from Biosphere is left abandoned at the alter by the aforementioned underwhelming emphasis to the true story narrative that continuously dulls the senses. Because Biosphere’s compositions are ringing with the kind of intensity and urgency that can’t be found anywhere in the consistency of the storytelling, it leaves them feeling overdramatic and even a tad bit one dimensional, stealing focus in the worst kind of ways, with tracks that never belong and mold as one cohesive essence to its personality.

OVERALL
Even with the afterhours work deposited thanklessly by Chastain and Redmayne at the helm, “The Good Nurse” never reaches a captivating pulse in connecting to its underwhelmed audience. It’s dramatically undercooked as a thriller, yet painfully pedestrian as a medicinal game-changer, leaving it a comatose John Doe in need of life support.

My Grade: 5/10 or D