Today, Charles Cullen is considered one of the most productive (to put it somewhat morbidly) serial killers in America. During his murderous career that lasted from the end of the eighties until the beginning of the 2000s, he confessed to the murder of 29 people, but it is assumed that Cullen could be responsible for several hundred more deaths. And what is the scariest and creepiest thing of all, this patient did all this while working as a paramedic in American hospitals, and this creepy true-crime combination of thriller and drama according to the script of the talented Scottish screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917, Last Night in Soho ) was recorded by Dane Tobias Lindholm.
Lindholm, on the other hand, has been a long-term screenwriting collaborator of the well-known compatriot Thomas Vinterberg, and after three solid films he directed in his homeland (R, A Hijacking, A War), he also decided to try his hand in America. And he did it in a school-like way, but I still found something missing in the film, which only grabbed a potentially interesting topic, even though there might have been a much better story. Because even before we start watching “The Good Nurse” it is clear to us that this sleazy weirdo played by Eddie Redmayne is a murderer. He just arrived at a new hospital, who knows which one, and he immediately befriended his colleague Amy (Jessica Chastain). And regardless of the fact that he initially seems accommodating, cordial, benevolent, or at least that’s the impression he wants to make on a colleague who is a single mother, and along the way suffers from a serious heart disease, the viewer knows from the beginning that he is the paramedic who kills patients.
By the end, we will find out how, not why, because it is about one of those typical Mindhunter psychopaths, but we will understand that this guy worked in numerous American hospitals for years and that it was an open secret that patients died on his shifts, and nothing was not undertaken. He would get fired, so he applied to another hospital, from which he would also be discharged after a while, and this lasted for years and years, until 2003, when the film begins. And regardless of the fact that both Redmayne and Chastain are in good form, although they are both in a slightly atypical for them muted, low-key edition, I think that something more could have been extracted from this correctly done story.
We see here only in glimpses that for this whole gruesome series of murders, at least as much as this madman, the system to which, by custom, people are completely irrelevant, was to blame. For all these hospitals all that time, the only thing that mattered was that no information leaked out, they protected themselves with those confidentiality agreements, and the simplest thing was to just fire the guy who does something so unthinkable and let someone else deal with him. I missed that opportunity to further problematize the cynicism of today’s system that didn’t even try to stop a maniac like Cullen who, in a somewhat typical Hollywood movie ending, sobs through tears that he did it because no one stopped him. Nevertheless, regardless of my wishes and greetings to the screenwriting team from whom I was secretly hoping for a different approach to this topic, “The Good Nurse” is still a quality and solid film.