The Good Nurse movie review: A semi-riveting detective thriller

When Tobias Lindholm’s The Good Nurse focuses on its detectives, played by Noah Emmerich and former football player Nnamdi Asomugha, it shines incredibly bright. Krysty Wilson-Cairns writes nail-biting dialogue for detectives Braun (Emmerich), and Baldwin (Asomugha), tasked to investigate the suspicious death of one of Amy Loughren’s (Jessica Chastain) patients. The hospital is trying to cover up for its mistakes, but there seems to be a pattern of patients “accidentally” double-dosed on insulin and digoxin.

*Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Good Nurse. Watch the movie before reading ahead.*

It turns out that “good nurse” Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) is poisoning saline bags in the storage room with both drugs, killing more than 400 patients. Why did he do it? No one knows, and the movie doesn’t shed a light on his, rationale either. But Redmayne knows how to play creepy right, and when Loughren realizes that he has been killing patients, the tension is off the charts.

There honestly couldn’t have been two better actors to play Loughren and Cullen than Chastain and Redmayne. Of course, Redmayne goes a little overboard near the end (in a scene that has been frequently memed on social media), and I have to admit that I laughed very hard at that scene where he repeatedly tells the detectives “I can’t,” but the rest of his performance is quite good.

There’s palpable tension between the two that only elevates itself as the movie progresses, and there’s a certain uneasiness in watching Redmayne play coy about killing patients while he “cares” for Amy’s children, like a sociopath desperate for attention and love.

It’s one of Redmayne’s better performances, solely because of his subtlety at delivering most of Cullen’s unease through minimal and restrained facial expressions. And yet he deftly marries Chastain’s more honest portrayal of Loughren, who now fears for her life when she realizes that her friend, one who she’s opened up to about her heart condition that other employees know nothing about, is a serial killer.

Good Nurse may be one of the most forgettable productions of the year

In one of its best sequences, Loughren collapses after discovering contaminated IV bags in the storage rooms. She wakes up in a hospital bed, with Cullen at her side, slowly taking an IV bag into her bloodstream. That’s where the audience, and the character, start to get truly frightened of Cullen. Is her IV bag contaminated? It only seems that Cullen picked bags randomly, so we don’t know if Loughren will leave the hospital alive.

It’s a genuinely chilling scene, but the movie lacks any emotional depth that would further uplift the drama. One of my biggest problems with Wilson-Carins’ screenplays is that, while it has scenes of riveting dialogue, it doesn’t develop its characters more than surface-level observations. The performances do more of the heavy lifting, there is a lot to be understood about Loughren and Cullen (but never gets explored), which would’ve made the movie an ultimately better and more emotionally investing drama.

Of course, we don’t know (and may never know) why Cullen did it. But that doesn’t mean the movie can’t explore both characters more than what was told, not by necessarily changing the story, but by giving both protagonists a more fleshed-out and gripping arc. The performances make the arcs gripping, but their writing is amazingly bog-standard. It also doesn’t help that the movie is poorly shot and lit, with many scenes looking amazingly murky and dark to compensate for the lack of a good atmosphere.

Regardless, when The Good Nurse focuses on the “detective” aspect of the case, it’s incredible. Emmerich and Asomungha are terrific together and hold the film’s emotional core far greater than Chastain and Redmayne, even if they give compelling performances. Lindholm crafts a good enough drama that may end up snagging a few award nominations for its performances, though it may be one of the most forgettable productions of the 2022 awards season.

The Good Nurse is streaming on Netflix.