Film review

  • Aftersun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charlotte Wells (2022)

    For starters, a caveat – the reverse of a spoiler alert.  I was looking forward to writer-director Charlotte Wells’s highly and widely praised first feature[1] though grateful for BFI’s advance email telling me ‘This film contains a sequence of flashing lights’.  A few minutes in, a strobe-lit rave exploded onto the screen and I closed my eyes, relieved to be getting the flashing lights over with so early.  It turned out to be just the first of many such sequences (I’d guess nine or ten albeit some are very short).  So I’m glad to have seen Aftersun but sorry not to have seen more of it – I must have looked away for several minutes all told.  If Wikipedia’s detailed plot synopsis is accurate, I missed significant things happening in the rave bits (all of which are dialogue-free).  This note could be as inadequate as BFI’s well-intentioned warning.

    The time is the 1990s, the place a budget Turkish coastal resort, where a Scottish father and daughter, Calum (Paul Mescal) and Sophie (Frankie Corio), are on a package holiday.  He’s thirty and she’s eleven but Calum passes for younger and they’re sometimes taken to be brother and sister.  Sophie lives with her mother, from whom Calum is separated, though a phone call he makes from Turkey suggests he and his ex are on amicable terms.  From what we see and Sophie says, she gets on well with both parents and Calum’s clearly happy to be spending time with his daughter.  Although he reveals little about his own life, he’s no less clearly unhappy with himself.  He’s emotionally up and down but the up seems willed, the down to come naturally.  In their hotel room, he reads self-help books and does Tai-chi moves but occasionally lets his sadness show – usually when Sophie’s not there to see but not always.  Using their camcorder to ‘interview’ Calum, she asks, ‘When you were eleven, what did you think you would be?’ and gets a grim-faced, troubled silence in reply.  As the holiday goes on, Sophie’s increasingly aware that there are things about her father she’s not able to know.

    They still enjoy much of their time together – swimming, playing pool, making fun of the tour reps leading a Macarena in the hotel’s entertainments area.  Charlotte Wells, who was born and grew up in Edinburgh and is now based in the US, does a fine job of conveying the dazzling, languorous textures of a red-hot holiday as experienced by people who don’t normally see much sun.  She captures the peculiar atmosphere – part relaxing, part unsettling – of the resort (the hotel is a semi-building site).  As well as feeling a distance from her father, Sophie also begins to see herself in relation to holiday-makers even closer to her own age – teenage girls with romantic ambitions for their stay, pre-adolescent and older boys whose pool-cue skills she more than matches.

    Wells uses an imaginative visual language to reflect Sophie’s perspective(s) on Calum.  This is well described by Leigh Singer in his Sight & Sound (December 2022) review of Aftersun:  ‘The beauty of [cinematographer] Gregory Oke’s tactile, colour-saturated images and often semi-obscured framing is that they express both the young Sophie’s oblivious perspective and her older self’s heightened attempt to (re-)construct a picture of her father that won’t ever fully shift into focus’.  I’m not sure ‘oblivious’ is quite right:  Sophie seems, rather, curious to understand more about Calum and to intuit she doesn’t know how to.  But Singer’s right about the ‘older self’ – a self who is both Sophie and the woman behind the camera.  Wells has made clear in interviews that Aftersun is essentially autobiographical retrospection.  She gives reality to this dimension of the material by introducing the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who is now herself about thirty, living with a female partner (Sarah Makharine) and their baby.  This Sophie isn’t on screen long enough to emerge as an individual in herself but she does register as the director’s alter ego.  There are more light-hearted moments with the camcorder than the one mentioned above.  The older Sophie watches this primitive footage, still trying, two decades later, to work her father out.  We get the feeling he’s no longer around for her to ask in person.

    Films that engross without much plot are often less impressive once the film-maker feels an obligation to make things happen.  Even when these are plausible you get the sense the director isn’t primarily interested in events.  Aftersun comes into this category, during what turns out to be the big evening of the holiday.  Sophie has put her and Calum’s names down to do ‘Losing My Religion’ at a karaoke session.  When the MC calls out their names Calum’s annoyed; it seems this has become an annual holiday ritual he’s now fed up with.  He refuses to go on stage so Sophie goes it alone (and sings lamely).  Soon afterwards, Calum suggests they have an early night.  Now it’s Sophie’s turn to dig her heels in: she insists on staying downstairs while Calum returns to their room.  He has allowed her time on her own before now.  Even though this is much later in the day, it’s credible he’d do so again when they’ve just had cross words.  But what happens next is too much.

    Of course, what happens may not have happened.  With the help of the thirtyish Sophie device, Charlotte Wells cleverly blurs the distinction between actual and imagined recollection; it goes without saying that, at one level, Sophie must be inventing what her father got up to in her absence.  While eleven-year-old Sophie fends off the attentions of Michael (Brooklyn Toulson), the blatant pre-adolescent boy who’s taken a fancy to her, Calum leaves the hotel room, wanders down to the beach alone and walks into the sea.  He disappears into darkness and Wells holds the shot for a long time, strongly implying that Calum has drowned himself.  Sophie makes her way back to the hotel room and finds it locked.  She goes to reception and falls asleep on a sofa there until the night manager turns up and unlocks the door of her room.  Inside, she finds Calum sleeping naked on the bed where she has usually slept.  It’s easy enough to accept the beach sequence as the older Sophie’s imagination – her reflection on how depressed her father may have been at the time – but the follow-up is less convincing, as Wells tries to fit the events of the evening into a continuing reality.  The next day, Calum says sorry to Sophie for his behaviour but is surprised when she mentions the night manager had to let her back into the hotel room.  What did Calum think had happened when he’d gone off with the key?  (Why doesn’t Sophie ask him that question?)

    Quite early on, Calum mentions to Sophie he’s hoping to get a place in London with a friend called Keith, and that she can visit there.  It’s one of the few things he says about his life apart from her and the sole verbal hint that he’s gay (or bisexual).  His attitude and tone of voice in a brief conversation with a diving instructor (Onur Eksioglu), during which Calum says he’s surprised to have lived to thirty and that he thinks forty’s a long shot, may also suggest this.  If there are other visual clues, though, they come with flashing lights.  When Calum says goodbye to Sophie at the airport, where she’ll catch a plane to return home to her mother, she watches him walk away and through swing doors, beyond which strobe glints are glimpsed.  The rave sequences in Aftersun seem to represent Calum’s other identity and its inaccessibility to Sophie but any link there may be between his sexuality and his unhappiness remains opaque.  As it must – ‘explaining’ the father would contradict the film’s main premise.

    In what’s a virtual two-hander, Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio are both excellent.  With a Scottish rather than his own Irish accent, Mescal doesn’t speak as naturally as he did so memorably in the TV adaptation of Normal People (or in his small role in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter last year) but his physical acting is of a high order.  He creates such an emotional rapport with an audience that we don’t need to know exactly what his character’s feeling in order to be held by and believe in him.  Mescal is so consistently truthful that he nearly makes sense even of Calum’s morning-after-the-night-before apology.  His young co-star is even more remarkable, especially in how she blends Sophie’s perceptiveness and incomprehension.  Charlotte Wells’s skilful direction of Frankie Corio, a newcomer to screen acting, stands out among the many strengths of Aftersun.

    24 November 2022

    [1] Afternote:  Its latest accolade, announced in December 2022, is first place in Sight & Sound’s poll for the year’s top 50 films.

  • The Good Nurse

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tobias Lindholm (2022)

    The opening scene shows a hospital patient, whose condition has unexpectedly and seriously worsened, surrounded by medical staff.  They include a male nurse, played by Eddie Redmayne, who stands silent and very slightly apart from his colleagues.  His stance isn’t liable to be noticed by his fellow nurses and doctors, whose attention is understandably on the dying patient.  Redmayne nevertheless holds himself and Tobias Lindholm positions his camera in ways that prompt viewers of The Good Nurse to assume the male nurse is responsible for what’s happened.  It’s a fine bit of physical acting and an unsubtle bit of direction.  The latter, in particular, is a sign of things to come.

    Redmayne is playing the serial killer Charles Cullen who, according to Wikipedia, ‘murdered dozens – possibly hundreds – of patients during a 16-year career spanning several New Jersey medical centers, until being arrested in 2003.  He confessed to committing as many as 40 murders, at least 29 of which have been confirmed, though interviews with police, psychiatrists and journalists suggest he committed many more’.  The numbers are so high because Cullen, despite coming under suspicion at a number of the hospitals that employed him, left each one with a good reference that enabled him to get another job and become someone else’s problem.  In 2002, he started work in the critical care unit of the Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey.  Amy Loughren, a nurse who worked alongside him and for a while became Cullen’s friend, helped bring about his eventual arrest.

    Lindholm’s film focuses on the relationship between Cullen and Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), and her interactions with hospital and police investigators.  A single mother of two, Amy suffers from cardiomyopathy, which she’s hiding from her employers through fear of losing her job:  she needs to keep going for another four months in order to qualify for the health insurance that will help her afford surgery.  She likes and respects Charlie Cullen, with whom she works night shifts in the ICU, and confides in him about her difficult circumstances.  Although there’s never any suggestion of a romance, they see each other outside work – Charlie spends time at Amy’s apartment  and gets on well with her young daughters, Maya (Devyn McDowell) and Alex (Alix West Lefler).  Charlie also has two daughters, from a broken marriage, and repeatedly laments his ex-wife’s refusal to let him see them.  As his friendship with Amy grows, so does the count of ICU patients taking a sudden, fatal turn for the worse.  Police detectives Danny Baldwin (Nnandi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) pursue an investigation into these deaths, despite the attempts to thwart them of Linda Garran (Kim Dickens), the hospital’s risk manager.  It emerges that the patients declined and died after receiving medication they hadn’t been prescribed – drugs such as digoxin and, though the patients concerned weren’t diabetic, insulin.  At first, Amy refuses to accept that Charlie is responsible.  She later, reluctantly changes her mind and agrees to help Baldwin and Braun bring him to justice.

    It makes sense that, in terms of screen time, Amy is the main character.  She’s the story’s heroine, with whom the audience can easily engage – Jessica Chastain, who holds the screen and the story together, makes engagement all the easier.  Little else makes sense, though, least of all, the instant introduction of Charlie Cullen as a (to say the least) suspicious figure.  If Lindholm had first presented Cullen purely as Amy sees him – a capable medical professional, an apparently nice guy, a valued support at a difficult time for her – we could have shared in her shock at discovery of who he really is.  Instead, and despite Redmayne’s naturally affable presence, Lindholm continues to present Cullen in a sinister light.  That really is the operative phrase and he’s a literally shady character:  Redmayne’s face is never fully lit until Cullen is finally in custody.  What’s more, cluing the viewer in from the start means that Cullen tends to upstage Amy:  we sympathise with her predicament but it pales into insignificance beside what he’s doing.  Why he’s doing it remains unclear.  At one point, Cullen recalls his own mother’s death in hospital and his distress at her loss of dignity as a patient.  That’s enough to make very creepy a scene in which, with no one else in the room, he attends to the naked corpse of an older woman he’s killed but doesn’t explain most of his other choices of victim.  He’s more believable when, after his arrest, Amy asks why he killed and he replies, ‘Because they didn’t stop me’.

    Krysty Wilson-Cairns’s screenplay is adapted from Charles Graeber’s 2013 book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder.  It’s hard to understand what she and Lindholm are aiming to do:  the film they’ve made doesn’t work as either a police procedural or a suspense thriller or a grim character study.  It’s a pity because there are able people in it beside the leads.  Devyn McDowell, one of the few assets of last year’s Annette, again makes a good impression.  Nnandi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich give effective low-key performances as the detectives.  Maria Dizzia has a vivid cameo as a nurse called Lori, an ex-colleague of Amy and, in a different hospital, of Cullen.  Amy gives Lori a long-time-no-see call; over lunch, Lori recalls the rash of sudden deaths on the ward where Cullen worked and autopsies that revealed the presence of insulin in several cases.

    The Good Nurse’s most confusing aspect is the perfunctory hospital inquiry that precedes the police investigation.  It’s unclear who instigates this internal inquiry or at what stage in the series of unexpected ICU deaths.  Why is the body of one such patient released for cremation while the internal inquiry is ongoing?  If the hospital authorities are merely going through the motions, why do they draw the matter to the attention of the state police – before Linda Garran tries to obstruct the criminal investigation?  At one point, Garran calls a general meeting of hospital staff to explain that the police will be conducting interviews with some of them; the staff don’t seem concerned by the news (or interested in how things progress).  When Baldwin interviews Amy, Garran insists on being present.  She’s suddenly called away; Baldwin seizes his chance and asks Amy about a dead patient’s insulin levels.  After Garran has returned to the interview room Baldwin makes further mention of the insulin; Garran doesn’t even ask what he’s referring to.  The film renames the Somerset Medical Center as Parkfield Memorial Hospital, presumably to guard against potential litigation.  While the two detectives retain their real names, Linda Garran’s name is invented.  Perhaps Lindholm sees ‘Because they didn’t stop me’ as his film’s slogan; perhaps he means Garran’s handling of the Parkfield inquiry and attitude towards the police to represent the successive evasions and duplicities of Cullen’s employers more generally.  But the plotting of this is deplorably clumsy.

    After its premiere at this year’s Toronto festival and a one-week theatrical release in the US, The Good Nurse started streaming on Netflix, who are going big on Charles Cullen.  A couple of weeks after the launch of Lindholm’s film, Capturing the Killer Nurse, a Netflix documentary about the events leading up to Cullen’s arrest, began streaming, too.  We watched it the evening after watching The Good Nurse, in the hope of understanding better key facts of the matter.  Its crummy tabloid title aside, the documentary, directed by Tim Travers Hawkins, is a decent piece of work and certainly clarifies what happened in terms of Somerset Medical Center’s monitoring of Cullen and police involvement.  Somerset became aware in June 2003 that Cullen had accessed the rooms and hospital records of patients other than his own, and entered on the hospital system requests for medications that hadn’t been prescribed.  The Somerset authorities were warned by the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System in July 2003 of suspicious overdoses that appeared to suggest a Somerset employee might be killing patients.  The hospital didn’t contact the New Jersey police until October 2003.

    Capturing the Killer Nurse, as well as being more informative than The Good Nurse, is also more dramatic – and not just in the timeline of events.  Tim Travers Hawkins interviews the courageous Amy Loughren, who’s now in her mid-fifties.  (As Lindholm’s closing text also notes, Loughren’s health has improved since heart surgery in 2008.)  In one part of the interview, she recalls wearing a police wire for a meeting with Cullen in a restaurant and her consternation when he greeted her there with a hug – something he’d never done before.  She felt sure that, as they embraced, Cullen would feel the box attached to the wire.  Somehow he didn’t.  Tobias Lindholm does include a restaurant meeting between the two, shortly before Cullen’s arrest, but chooses to omit this heart-in-mouth detail, as if The Good Nurse had better things to do.  Who knows what those are.

    22-23 November 2022

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