Credit: Netflix

You’d think that a hospital is meant to be the one place where you can hand your life over to complete strangers and trust that they are trying to save it, and The Good Nurse portrays the rotten irony of the statement.

The Netflix film is based on the real case of Charles Cullen, a nurse who worked across several hospitals while patients died around him, and the more you learn about how long he was able to continue, the more disturbing the whole affair becomes. Just imagine a serial killer hiding in a place built around care and reviving your health? You would think someone would have stopped him sooner.

Netflix put The Good Nurse out in October 2022, with Danish director Tobias Lindholm working from Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ adaptation of Charles Graeber’s book. Of course, a story like this would be begging for all the usual true crime treatment, but none of that tone can be found here. Lindholm keeps the whole thing plain, and that is exactly what makes it feel so much nastier.

The hospital looks completely normal, which is why Cullen feels even more dangerous in it. He is not skulking about like some obvious villain; half the time, he just looks like another nurse getting through a shift. The danger is right there in plain sight, and nobody seems to notice.

Jessica Chastain plays Amy Loughren, an ICU nurse with a serious heart condition who cannot afford to stop working before her health insurance kicks in, so she is already running on fumes when Eddie Redmayne’s Charles Cullen joins the ward. At first, he seems like a godsend, taking pressure off Amy during gruelling shifts and becoming someone she can actually rely on. You almost think, finally, she can catch a break. Pfft, fat chance.

When patients begin dying for reasons that do not add up, Amy notices troubling patterns in Cullen’s medication records, and while detectives start asking questions, the hospital appears reluctant to answer. This is where the film really starts to make your blood boil, because the problem is no longer just Cullen; it is the bureaucratic inertia around him.

Chastain is superb because she makes Amy look the perfect amount of knackered and completely aware of what she could lose, which makes the fact that the real Amy Loughren wore a wire while meeting Cullen even more astonishing. It sounds like the sort of thing a screenwriter would add while laying it on a bit thick, except no, that part actually happened.

Redmayne, meanwhile, made Cullen so terrifying, he garnered some Golden Globe and Bafta nominations, which makes perfect sense once you see how menacing he feels without making it all a loud theatrical performance.

The film reached number one on Netflix’s global English-film chart during its launch week with more than 68million hours viewed, but the numbers are not what give The Good Nurse its staying power. Because one killer managing to slip through the cracks is horrifying enough, a system that keeps leaving those cracks open? Now that really takes the biscuit.