Written by Andreas Babiolakis

Throughout the awards season, we’ll get around to some much-discussed films that we didn’t previously review.

Never doubt the importance of screenwriting. You could have a film that excels in every other way that still falls flat because of how it is written. Case in point: the 2022 true crime drama The Good Nurse. I don’t want to say that Krysty Wilson-Cairns can’t write, because her work in 1917 is quite a different story: she worked with Sam Mendes to make a World War I experience that conveyed truly human notions with as little as possible. I just cannot help but notice the ways that The Good Nurse thuds where 1917 sprints, though: the war film connects us with simple-yet-beautiful dialogue, and yet The Good Nurse almost feels like a high school drama assignment in comparison. One point that sticks out in my mind is how a remark about how an investigation has gone on for seven weeks is met with the incredibly-dramatic retort “Eight weeks. It’s been eight weeks.” So, what’s an extra week? This is the basis of an intense realization? If the investigation was actually in its eighth month, fine. The intended emphasis here is just puzzling, and The Good Nurse is riddled with head-scratching moments like this.

Still, the true-story element of the film gets us by. The Good Nurse is based on the real killings of Charles Cullen: a nurse that was continuously discharged due to rising suspicions of his purposeful overdosing of patients at the various hospitals he worked at. He would get away with these murders because hospitals would try to clean his tracks, as to not face liability charges or blame from those that question why their loved ones — of whom were seemingly healthy enough to face a full recovery in the near future — would randomly die out of the blue. At the start of The Good Nurse, he’s at Parkfield Memorial Hospital, and he comes across another nurse named Amy Loughren that is housing her own secret: she is suffering from cardiomyopathy, and if word gets out, she could lose her job and be unable to support her children. She bonds with Cullen, who takes care of her kids when needed and even offers to look after her (once he learns of her illness). There’s a clever turning-of-tables once Loughren cannot avoid Cullen’s second nature, especially since he has been the caregiver her life needed (and now she knows that a serial killer has full access to her vulnerability). It’s truly scary stuff.

Eddie Redmayne is chilling as Cullen and he has the efficient-coworker-I’d-never-suspect facade down pat. Even when you learn his bad side, he doesn’t really change how he is acting, but we’re getting new information we never noticed before: loaded responses, a gentle gaze now feels like a venomous stare, and an aura of evil that used to feel like warmth. Jessica Chastain equals Redmayne’s role as a no-nonsense nurse that exhibits both fear and the strength to protect her family from a potentially fatal threat; her work as Loughren should be as discussed as Redmayne this awards season. You are likely going to be watching the film for these two leads anyway, but there are other elements that hint at something greater here, from Biosphere’s ghostly score (which reminds me of Burial at times) to Jody Lee Lipes’ perfectly-frigid cinematography that I could feel in my bones. Again, many things line up in The Good Nurse, and this could have been a great picture.

Unfortunately, it just isn’t. Look past the dialogue that feels tonally off or rudimentary (people tend to speak like objective-spouting heads in this film), and you’ll find a plot that does seem to go somewhere, but only through a thick fog, as it wobbles along. The only parts of the story that feel certain in their conviction are the moments full of medical jargon, but even then this feels rather coldly told (and I could also be dense and not realizing the faults in these moments as well, since I’m no medical expert). All of these faults turn an authentically horrifying series of crimes into an acting exposition: an experiment to see how greatly one can perform when they are competing against a screenplay that would destroy most thespians on the big screen. When Netflix tried to shove Capturing the Killer Nurse down my throat (a documentary about Cullen that actually came out the very same year), I was almost tempted to hop right into it despite its mediocre reception on the very basis that I felt unfulfilled with what I learned from The Good Nurse.

It may be true that Cullen never went into why he did what he did, but a film that better placed us in the shoes of those that experienced these murders firsthand could have allowed us to discern our own perspectives. The Good Nurse rallies off the facts like a first draft of a better film, and it feels rushed out into the world, either to make the festival circuit or to pair up nicely with the documentary of the same subject. Either way, The Good Nurse should have been great, but it doesn’t even live up to its name. It’s The So-so Film About The Good Nurse, and it’s only this watchable because of the miracles the two leads pull off in surgically repairing a feature this void of depth.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.