The Good Nurse movie review: Eddie Redmayne, Jessica Chastain seesaw between caregiving and criminality

Cut to seven years later. We’re now in Parkfield Memorial Hospital, New Jersey, and the camera begins to follow Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), an overworked ICU nurse with a severe heart condition and no health insurance. A single mother of two young girls, she’s struggling to hold it all together. Things soon begin to look like they can fall apart any minute. Enter Charlie. The godsend. He begins to help her with the caregiving, both at the hospital and at home.

Bolstered by Charlie’s companionship, Amy’s life begins to get some semblance of stability, but just then, inexplicable patient deaths start to shake the hospital. Mandate forces Parkfield to call external detectives for investigation. But eager to wash their hands off the matter, the hospital authorities offer little help and do everything to stonewall the probe. However, our sleuths (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich), egged on by a few flimsy clues, plod on nevertheless. Charlie soon comes under the scanner. But to reach him, they need Amy.

The tight editing by Adam Nielsen deserves a special mention too. At 123 minutes, The Good Nurse is as fast-paced as you’d expect a thriller to be and yet, it never loses its meditative strain. It’s probably too sanitised for a medical crime drama, but rather than glorifying the horrors of Charlie’s violence, the film focuses more on celebrating Amy’s quiet bravery — her decision to aid the investigation against a close friend and colleague at the risk of losing her job, life, and the safety of her children

The Good Nurse wonderfully exposes how little hospitals care for the lives of their patients and the lengths they can go to cover up a blunder and save face. Of the nine medical establishments where Charlie worked in 16 years, most were suspicious of him but did nothing about it. They just let him flit from one hospital to the other killing patients. Finally, when charged, he pled guilty to murdering 29 people. The actual number is believed to be a lot higher, somewhere close to 400.

It’s common for true-crime stories to test the humanity of an ordinary working professional caught in an extraordinary circumstance. But what sets The Good Nurse apart from most similar films is its rejection of violence as a tool for justice. In choosing compassion over judgment without risking the safety of others, Amy proves herself not just a good, but a great nurse, which is the right of every patient seeking healthcare.