Jessica Chastain grabs her heart and catches a maniac. Should You Watch The Good Nurse?

The Kind Nurse premiered on Netflix on October 26. The film is based on the book The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber. She, in turn, is based on real events from the life of Charles Edmund, a serial killer who worked in hospitals.

The film was directed by Tobias Lindholm. Prior to that, he directed the mini-series Investigation and the film War. But he is much better known as the screenwriter of Vinterberg's films "Hunting", "One More". The producer was Darren Aronofsky ("Pi", "Requiem for a Dream", "Mother"). Starring Jessica Chastain (Interstellar, Scenes from a Marriage) and Eddie Redmayne (Stephen Hawking's Fantastic Beasts trilogy).

Amy works as a nurse in a regular hospital and is waiting for the moment when she will have insurance - she needs heart surgery. Because of the disease, Amy has pre-infarction conditions. The situation is aggravated by the need to work alone on the night shift. Luckily for her, the hospital hires Charlie, an experienced nurse, and Amy shares duties with him. All of a sudden, patients start dying. The police are trying to find out who is behind this, and Amy studies the biography of her colleague and finds many suspicious episodes in it.

A great start can be deceiving

The most amazing part of the movie is the first 15 minutes. The story of a nurse who suffers from an illness and does not have time to raise children looks heartbreaking. Excellent dialogues, an incredible game by Jessica Chastain and a wonderful visual range make you empathize with the heroine from the very beginning.

But as soon as the main storyline begins to develop, the drama gradually turns into an unobtrusive background, and then completely disappears from the picture. At the same time, it is much more interesting and convincing than the thriller with which it is being replaced.

Predictability spoils viewing

The plot of almost the entire Kind Nurse can be predicted after reading a brief description. And if the first 10-15 minutes allow you to believe that the expectations were wrong, then the most boring assumptions begin to come true.

It's not just about the main plot (it's based on real events that you can read about before watching), but also about the details. Each new scene prepares the viewer for the next so thoroughly that you can almost frame-by-frame think over the next 3-4 minutes.

Predictability makes The Kind Nurse a film in which the viewer plays the role of an expert and wonders why he is looking at such stupid people. I constantly want to tell the characters or remind them of some simple facts that they ignore.

Detectives are terrible

The Good Nurse has amazingly stupid cops. They have been doing business for weeks and do not know if the drug is dangerous, which (in their own words) has already killed the patient! Against this background, it is not at all surprising that they do not know what color it is, so they are forced to consult with Amy.

When a nurse joins an investigation, she not only explains medical details to the detectives, but also leads himself as an investigator - makes assumptions, tries to connect different events and even communicates with probable witnesses. At some point, the detectives ask a nurse with a heart condition to conduct an interrogation - and this is so it is absurd that there is a feeling that now Amy will take a gun and handcuffs, and then go to catch offender.

Completely idiotic questions and errors of detectives not only irritate, but also slow down the course of the story.

In one scene, detectives put a microphone on Amy and ask her to extract a confession from Charlie during goodbye in the cafe. The dialogue fails, Charlie leaves the cafe, and the detectives go there exactly 10 seconds later. In theory, the perpetrator could look out the window and see the policemen running towards the interlocutor. It all looks like the detectives are dreaming about Charlie exposing their plan.

Nothing happens for half the movie.

By the end of the first half, the film finally fizzles out. The pace drops, there are no new events and information, repetitions of the same phrases and assumptions begin. Detectives are stupid with the same zeal, the main character sometimes grabs her heart.

The two-hour running time is completely unsuitable for a film where everything is so predictable. Perhaps a higher pace of narration would at least slightly brighten up an uninteresting investigation. However, there was another way - to give a little more drama, but the authors abandoned this idea. As a result, the second hour of the film seems labored and meaningless, it could easily be cut in half.

The killer's motives are ignored

According to Charlie, his victims did not resist the killings. So basically he felt like a savior doing euthanasia. Considering that nothing happens in the second half of the film, it was possible to reveal this motive. However, starting from the middle of the film, patients do not appear on the screen at all.

Charlie tried to go deeper, little by little talking about his past. There are 3-4 boring facts that the audience learns about in the first 20 minutes, then they repeat endlessly. So, Charlie says that his ex-wife tried to accuse him of cruelty to animals - he will tell this story twice more during the film. It is difficult to say what is remarkable about it, but the authors of the picture decided that other information about Charlie's past was even more uninteresting. It's strange, given that the film is based on real events — you could find at least some bright details.

The acting nearly saves the movie

Despite the rather boring plot and not the most detailed script, the film is excellent as an example of acting performances. Both Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne are great. Their characters come alive only because of acting. At the same time, Amy is at least somehow spelled out and detailed, and Charlie is completely empty. This is the case when there is no information and texture, but there are emotions, and only a good actor makes the character minimally interesting. In general, Eddie Redmayne did much more for his character than the writers.

The Good Nurse could have been an interesting film about a serial killer who claims to be a savior. It was possible to study the reasons why a person decided on such a role, as well as show his conversations with the victims.

In fact, the porridge came out of genre scraps that were not able to combine into something unified. The film starts as a drama, then becomes a detective story, and then becomes thriller — and the beginning turned out to be successful. Further viewing will put even the biggest fan of Jessica Chastain or serial killers to sleep, so not everyone will see the terrible end credits - and that's good.