The Good Nurse is a true story about a serial killer who worked as a nurse in hospitals. He got away with murder for years. In this film we see how he finally got stopped.
The Good Nurse stars Eddie Redmayne as the killer Charlie Cullen and Jessica Chastain as the nurse who finally brought him down, Amy Loughren.
Cullen would put insulin in bags of saline. Whatever unlucky patient got one of his laced bags of saline would die. The truly infuriating thing about this true story is that hospitals where he worked always knew what he was doing. But rather than face the liability costs of charging him, they fired him and passed him along to another hospital where he did the same thing again.
In my mind, that makes the hospitals as sick and responsible as Cullen.
In a hospital in New Jersey, where Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) was a night nurse, he finally met his match.
The two of them started off as good friends. Amy had a heart condition and Charlie helped her and was kind to her.
Two police officers, Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) and Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) came around asking about a questionable death at the hospital. Amy’s boss, Linda Garran (Kim Dickens), insisted on being in on every interview with her staff. During Amy’s interview, she left the room for one moment and the cops took advantage of her absence to ask the right question.
Amy answered truthfully and the hunt was on for a way to catch Charlie Cullen. It took a while to gather evidence. Proof was hard to get. Amy helped the police get a confession, which was finally Cullen’s downfall.
Cullen was charged with 29 murders he admitted to, but authorities think there might have been as many as 400 victims of this man. This man passed from hospital to hospital like a pedophile priest moving from church to church.
Eddie Redmayne was great at being creepy in this. Even when he was kind and helpful to Amy, he was creepy. Jessica Chastain beautifully played a single mom with two kids, a heart condition, no insurance, and the moral courage to tell the truth.
The film was dramatic and suspenseful. Odd camera angles and extreme close ups gave it a strange quality that fit the topic. It’s a horrible story, but the film tells it well. You can see it on Netflix.