Medical thriller “The Good Nurse” sets streaming records on Netflix
Medical thriller "The Good Nurse" sets streaming records on Netflix
In its first week of streaming on Netflix, the American drama “The Good Nurse” reached the first place in the national and global rankings. The medical detective story directed by Tobias Lindholm was one of the ten most viewed movies on the virtual market in 93 countries, with a total of 68.3 million hours of viewing.
The film is based on a script by Scottish playwright Christy Wilson-Cairns. The screenplay, in turn, is based on a documentary detective novelist Charles Graeber’s The Good Nurse: The Real Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder, which was published in 2013. The author of the book explored in detail the documented history of serial killer Charles Cullen. He worked as a nurse at several hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He killed patients by adding non-prescription drugs to the medicinal solution they received through the IV, leading to fatal outcomes.
“The Good Nurse” had its world premiere this past September at the Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix released it to theaters briefly in October with the obvious goal of qualifying for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts for a future entry in the Oscar race. Experts are predicting it will receive nominations in several key categories.
Angel and the Devil.
Charles Cullen was arrested in 2003. He confessed to killing about forty patients during his 16 years as a nurse at nine hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and was sentenced to 11 life sentences. He faced the death penalty, and to avoid it, he agreed to cooperate with the investigation and testify truthfully. Investigators believe that Cullen may have sent up to 400 patients to the afterlife.
For example, even in the first hospital that hired him, he secretly poured lethal doses of drugs into IV bags in the storage room. His colleagues unsuspectingly used the bags to give intravenous injections to their patients. Cullen admitted to poisoning three to five pouches each week.
The title of the book and film The Good Nurse loses its ambiguity when translated into Russian. Historically, a nurse is a strictly female profession, and gender identity is already evident in the Russian word “nurse. Hence the need to introduce the “symmetrical” word “nurse”, although many do not like it. In America, a nurse can be simply called a nurse, but there are also such variants as male nurse or even murse. More and more men in America are pursuing this profession. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 13.3 percent of certified nurses (RNs) in 2021 are men, up from 7 percent in 2008.
Why is the ambiguity of the original title important?
Because the film introduces us to two nurses. Nurse Charles Cullen and Nurse Amy Logren. The first only seems good, the second, on the other hand, completely lives up to that definition. In fact, she is the central figure in this doomed angel-devil friendship. And we learn much more about Amy than we do about Charlie.
Amy Logren is a single mother with two young daughters suffering from severe heart disease and forced to work as a nurse to wait for health insurance, without which she cannot afford complex surgery. New employees of American health care facilities are usually not entitled to insurance in the first few months. Amy keeps her illness a secret from the administration because she is not unreasonably afraid that she will be immediately fired when they find out about her health problems.
The good nurse Amy Logren was embodied by Jessica Chastain, playing her extremely convincingly, without embellishment or tantrums. The audience’s empathy for her character is guaranteed from the first frame.
Overdose of Truth.
As for Charlie, he’s as new to this hospital, to the ICU, as Amy is. Eddie Redmayne masterfully plays the sweet, kind, dependable guy who knows the ins and outs of his tough job as a nurse, who she can count on to help her out if she needs it. Not surprisingly, they instantly become friends.
From Charlie’s cursory accounts, he, too, has two young children, but he and his wife are separated, and he is now alone. Charlie and Amy become close, the nurse sleeps at her house and helps her as a babysitter. The filmmakers hint that their relationship is purely friendly, platonic in nature.
What exactly was it about Charlie that fascinated Amy?
“Shy,” the real Amy Logren told reporter David Smith, a correspondent of the British newspaper “The Guardian” in Washington. – He spoke so ingratiatingly that I instantly felt the urge to defend him, and my whole nature focused on it. I saw how knowledgeable he was; he knew about drugs, about cures, and I was drawn to people smarter than me. He laughed at my jokes. So we became friends.
He knew about drugs… Yes, he knew a lot. He knew, for example, that a certain dose of insulin and other drugs for patients with a certain diagnosis is fatal.
The movie is a masterful, Hitchcockian way of keeping the tension. “The good nurse” turns out to be a villain and a monster, but Amy doesn’t know this until later. It is only gradually, largely thanks to information obtained by a pair of investigators investigating suspicious deaths, that she comes to realize that her crony was deliberately killing hospital patients.
The investigation into Charlie, led by meticulous detectives Baldwin and Brown (good work by actors Namdi Asomugha and TV favorite Noah Emmerich), comes to a formal standstill. But it is Amy, already fully aware of whom she has nestled on her chest, who will help the investigation. With her consent, her conversations with Charlie are secretly recorded. She overcomes the throes of doubt. After all, she is in effect betraying her friend, “turning him in” to justice. Let us call things by their proper names. Amy becomes a “truth-teller” who, contrary to the prohibitions of the hospital management, which at first torpedoed the investigation, begins to help the investigators.
The way Chastain shows the evolution of her character can be considered her brilliant acting achievement.
The honor and dishonor of the uniform
As critics have noted, The Good Nurse breaks out of the stereotypical series of serial killer thrillers.
Don Cecil, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, cited “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” recently released by the same Netflix movie, as a typical example of speculation on the subject. In her book “Fear, Justice and Modern Crime,” she described how real-life nightmares are “repackaged” for the needs of popular culture. The mainstays of this process are women as victims, bloody staging of crimes and a poorly concealed ecstasy of murder.
“The genre reinforces sensationalism because the market demands it,” Cecil told The Atlantic magazine’s Shirley Lee in a conversation. – When we’re shown stories of serial killers, I don’t know if we can avoid the hyperbole.”
As Shirley Lee points out in her review of the film, director Lindholm takes a radically different approach. The director does not dwell on the physiological details of the crimes m on the detailed study of Cullen’s psyche. Instead, Lindholm focuses on the professional hospital environment that allowed the maniac to commit horrific crimes over a long period of time. He wonders why the many mechanisms for protecting the health and well-being of patients did not work, why no one intervened and took an interest in the suspicious statistics of the mysterious deaths. After all, the suspicious nurse managed to jump easily from hospital to hospital. With each new hire, no one bothered to check his medical history.
As critics have noted, the virtue of the film is the restraint with which its authors describe routine hospital life and the obvious shortcomings of practical medicine. They avoid the Michael Moore-esque accusatory publicity and the temptation to satirically denounce, say, hospital risk manager Linda Garran (actress Kim Dickens). This collective image could easily be turned into a purely negative character. She defends the honor of the uniform, fending off questions from investigators, hiding key documents from them and trying to gloss over the facts. But gradually she begins to understand that we are talking about serious crimes, and stops sweeping the evidence under the rug. Such a challenging, evolving character, which makes it compelling.
“A symptom of dark capitalism.”
Of course, in that the “bad nurse” has been committing crimes for so long, the film unequivocally points to the shortcomings of the American health care system.
Why didn’t any of the nine hospitals’ red alert lights go off at the first suspicious incident? Why didn’t their administrations contact the police?
The hospital administrations feared that by publicizing suspicious incidents, they would become defendants in courts of law, where family members of the victims would turn. Any such case would tarnish the whole hospital, and it might be in deep trouble. It seemed much safer to fire a suspected nurse with a neutral wording that would allow him to take a job at another hospital, since the United States has long had a severe shortage of certified nurses.
“Once we started making money off of human suffering,” Logren said in an interview, “we lost our spirit, and these patients stopped being seen as human beings. They became a dollar sign. They became just a diagnosis. They’ve become something to exploit. The decision makers are so far away from the bedsides of the sick that they have stopped caring. This is a definite symptom of the dark capitalism that our health care system has become.”
After Cullen’s entire criminal odyssey was revealed, the courts received complaints from the victims’ families. Reportedly, all the claims were settled out of court and the terms of the money settlements were kept secret.
The director and playwright also had to deal with the delicate problem of the primes of the maniac’s victims. They had to change their names and the specifics of their diagnoses so as not to re-traumatize their families.
Mr. Cullen.
The question of crime motivation was left open by the filmmakers. When the on-screen Cullen is asked this question, he answers, “They didn’t stop me.”
Playwright Christy Wilson-Cairns, when asked by Esquire magazine about Cullen’s motivations, said: “We thought a lot about it, and I realized that people are curious because they want to feel safe. They think if we find out what happened to him, what his motivation was, then we can deal with it in the future. But the truth is much more complicated than that.”
According to the New York Magazine, Cullen once told investigators that he killed seriously ill people to end their suffering. But many witnesses, including Logren, deny a “compassionate” motive, pointing out that the killer nurse’s victims included perfectly healthy people, and certainly not terminally ill ones.
“Did she notice anything suspicious about Charlie’s behavior? – The real Amy was asked by journalist David Smith.
“I’ve noticed signs of depression in him,” she replied. – Maybe something similar to my emotional state, maybe reliving some childhood drama.”
Cullen’s father, a bus driver, is known to have died when Charlie was less than a year old, and his mother died in a traffic accident when he was a teenager. During his time in the Navy, his fellow officers noticed oddities in him, then and later he tried to commit suicide several times and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. In the interrogation scene with the nurse there is a violent hysteria, which reinforces the idea of a severe mental disorder.
Eddie Redmayne brilliantly fulfills the director’s assignment not to “prompt” the motivation of the serial killer. Who is he, a paranoid psychopath resentful of fate, or a sadist who takes pleasure in his actions?
Be that as it may, in Charlie Cullen two people, good and evil, coexist in an incomprehensible way, which brings to mind comparisons to Stevenson’s famous tale, The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In his relationship with Amy and her daughters, he is the kindest Dr. Jekyll, and as a cold-blooded serial killer, he does far more atrocities than Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde.
Netflix has decided to back up the release of the Cullen feature film with Capturing the Killer Nurse, a documentary. It will be available to subscribers on November 11. The film is directed by Emmy Award-nominated director Tim Travers Hawkins. It features taped revelations from Cullen himself, testimony from Amy Logren, writer Graeber, the detectives who investigated the case and family members of the victims.
“Cullen’s horrific crimes,” the documentary’s announcement reads, “highlight existing threats to our entire health care system.