The Good Nurse

I watched The Good Nurse on a rainy Tuesday while my neighbor was power-washing their driveway for three hours straight, and the constant, dull hum of the machine outside weirdly synchronized with the sterile, mechanical dread of this movie. It’s a film that thrives in that low-frequency anxiety. You know the feeling—the one where you’re in a hospital waiting room and the fluorescent lights are just a bit too bright, and you realize you are entirely at the mercy of strangers with clipboards.

In an era where Netflix churns out true crime content like a factory line, it’s easy to let a title like this slip into the "maybe next weekend" queue. We’ve been conditioned to expect sensationalism—slow-motion recreations, ominous synths, and a focus on the killer’s "dark genius." But director Tobias Lindholm (who wrote the incredible Another Round and directed the tense A War) takes a different route. This isn't a movie about the brilliance of a murderer; it’s a movie about the exhausting, quiet heroism of a woman trying to survive a broken system.

Two Titans in Scrubs

The heavy lifting here is done by Jessica Chastain, playing Amy Loughren, a night-shift nurse living with a life-threatening heart condition she can't afford to treat. This is the "Contemporary Cinema" reality at its most biting: a healthcare worker who can't access healthcare because she’s four months shy of insurance eligibility. Chastain plays Amy with a trembling, weary groundedness. She isn’t a "movie hero"; she’s a mom who’s tired of being tired.

Then comes Eddie Redmayne as Charlie Cullen. We’ve seen Redmayne do the "transformative" thing before—usually with a lot of physical tics and Oscar-baiting flourishes—but here, he is terrifyingly still. He enters the frame like a soft-spoken angel of mercy, helping Amy with her kids and her meds. Redmayne’s twitchy stillness is more terrifying than any slasher mask. There’s a scene later in the film, an interrogation, where he finally "breaks," and it’s the most unsettling thing he’s ever put on film. He doesn't go full Joker; he just becomes a broken machine.

The chemistry between them feels authentic because Chastain and Redmayne are close friends in real life, and that warmth makes the eventual betrayal feel like a physical blow. You want them to be friends. You want Charlie to be the "Good Nurse" the title suggests, which makes the discovery of his "double-dosing" patients with insulin and digoxin all the more sickening.

The Villain is the Boardroom

What separates The Good Nurse from your standard Law & Order episode is its blistering indictment of the American hospital industry. As the police—played with a nice, frustrated cynicism by Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich—try to investigate the sudden deaths, they aren't blocked by the killer. They’re blocked by the hospital’s legal team.

Kim Dickens plays the hospital administrator with a chilling, polite corporate distance. The movie posits a terrifying truth: the hospitals knew Charlie was dangerous. They just didn't want the liability. They’d rather fire him for "discrepancies in his resume" and pass him off to the next unsuspecting hospital than admit a crime happened on their watch. It’s a corporate horror movie disguised as a medical thriller. In the current landscape of post-pandemic reflection, where we’ve spent years talking about "healthcare heroes," seeing the systemic rot beneath that term feels especially pointed.

Lindholm’s direction is surgically cold. The cinematography by Jody Lee Lipes (who lensed Manchester by the Sea) avoids the glossy, "prestige" look of many streaming originals. It’s grey, muted, and claustrophobic. You can almost smell the antiseptic and the stale coffee.

Behind the Charts

While the film feels like a tight, contained drama, the production was actually quite a feat. Redmayne and Chastain reportedly went to "nurse camp" for weeks, learning how to handle needles and IV bags with the muscle memory of professionals. It shows. There’s no clunky "Hollywood" medical acting here; they move through the ward with a practiced, bored efficiency that makes the environment feel lived-in.

Interestingly, the real Amy Loughren was a constant presence during development. Chastain has mentioned in interviews that she felt a massive responsibility to capture the specific physical toll of Amy’s cardiomyopathy. The fact that this "unthinkable true story" actually happened across nine hospitals over sixteen years without anyone stopping Cullen is the trivia fact that will keep you up at night. The film doesn't even show the full scale of his crimes—estimates suggest he may have killed up to 400 people—because Lindholm realized that the scale of the numbers is less scary than the silence of the institutions.

The Good Nurse is a somber, deliberate piece of filmmaking that respects your intelligence. It avoids the easy "monster" tropes to show us a more recognizable, bureaucratic kind of evil. It might feel a bit slow for those looking for a high-octane cat-and-mouse game, and the ending is more of a sigh than a bang, but that’s the point. It’s a tribute to the person who stood up when the system stayed seated. If you’re looking for a double feature, pair this with Spotlight—both movies understand that the scariest thing in the world is a group of powerful people deciding to look the other way.