Actors and actresses with angelic faces always make, because we would never attribute such designs to them, excellent characters of deceivers and assassins. With his diaphanous complexion and large clear eyes, Eddie Redmayne is a perfect candidate for this type of role. So here he is slipping into the shoes of Charles Cullen, a nurse convicted of 29 murders but suspected of having perpetrated 400 more, facing Jessica Chastain as a suspicious colleague. Based on a famous case, The Good Nurse (Murders without order), on Netflix on Wednesday, is proving to be quite effective in its genre.
The success of the film is essentially due to the superior quality of the interpretation: both Eddie Redmayne, perfect with calculated solicitude in the role of nurse Charles “Charlie” Cullen, and Jessica Chastain, moving with resilient positivism in that of nurse Amy Loughren wows. Apart from an incongruous explosion towards the end in the case of the first, the two stars opt for restraint and interiority. Him an Oscar winner for The Theory of Everything (The theory of the universe), in Stephen Hawkins, her for The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Tammy Faye’s eyes), as a fallen televangelist, know how to play every muscle in their marvelously expressive faces.
The crimes of Charlie Cullen, who tampered with patients’ solution bags, being notorious, the film has the intelligence not to seek to cultivate ambiguity. In the opening, the distant expression of the nurse facing a patient that colleagues are trying in vain to resuscitate is chilling. By taking the decision to put the public in their confidence, the screenplay by Krysty Wilson-Cairns, co-author of those of 1917 and Last Night in Soho (One last night in Soho), takes a distinctly Hitchcockian avenue.
Thus, as before her the protagonist of Shadow of a Doubt (The shadow of a doubt) who adores her uncle Charles (another “Charlie”, like) before suspecting him of being a killer, a reality of which the public is already aware, the heroine of The Good Nurse befriends the one who is unbeknownst to him, but not to the onlookers, an assassin. Worse, Amy quickly places herself in a relationship of dependence vis-à-vis her new colleague and comrade who is very (too) quick to help her in different parts of her life that we will not mention here.
Another interesting aspect of the script is its scathing criticism of the American hospital community — or rather the “American hospital industry” — whose leaders are prepared to deny the evidence of suspicious deaths in order to avoid bad publicity and lawsuits. Or when money trumps patients’ lives.
Some Weaknesses
Where the shoe pinches, it is on the plan of the setting in scene. At best, Tobias Lindholm’s direction proves to be adequate. Best known for his collaborations as a co-screenwriter with filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg (The hunt, Breathalyzer), a fellow Danish, Lindholm offers nothing terribly imaginative, visually speaking.
With the exception of a very slow and very effective dolly shot forward during the opening sequence already mentioned and a handful of discreetly evocative shots offered here and there, in terms of camera movements and compositions, this is the minimum service. We can also film sanitized places and suggest professional and existential grayness without limiting ourselves to an agreed “grey-blue-grey-beige” aesthetic.
The police component is also quite weak, from the two one-dimensional investigators to the treatment of the procedural component which is in turn didactic and old-fashioned.
But, again, Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain prevail. For the account, the film is never more gripping than when it explores the dilemma of Amy, who devotes a deep friendship to Charlie but obviously cannot let him continue. It is moreover the sincere confusion of his colleague who will get the better of the last defenses of the killer. Charlie is this angel of death who flies from hospital to hospital, able to dodge everything, except, in the end, the kindness of Amy.