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
