Film Review: THE GOOD NURSE (2022): Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain Are in Fine Form in a Terrifying Cautionary Tale

The Good Nurse Review

The Good Nurse (2022) Film Review, a movie directed by Tobias Lindholm, written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and starring Eddie Redmayne, Jessica Chastain, Nnamdi Asomugha, Noah Emmerich, Kim Dickens, David Lavine, Denise Pillott, Dartel McRae, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Devyn McDowell, Alix West Lefler, Ajay Naidu and Jennean Farmer.

The Good Nurse features a plot that boggles the mind the more you watch it because of the frightening story line it portrays. Directed by Tobias Lindholm, it must be said that the film’s stars, Oscar winners Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, play their roles to absolute perfection. However, some of the pieces of this movie feel so implausible at times that you could hardly believe they really happened. The fact that the events in the film are real make the picture even more bone-chilling and a movie that demands the viewer’s attention, however annoying some of the scenes in the movie feel. Some sequences are frustrating to watch but are important to the structure of the story and to understand the movie’s main point: True evil exists in the world and could be right within the person beside us.

Primarily set about 20 years ago, Eddie Redmayne portrays Charlie Cullen, a male nurse who befriends Amy Loughren (Chastain) who is struggling financially and also physically when we meet her. Amy is an ICU nurse who needs a heart transplant. The hospital the movie is set in is Parkfield and is located in New Jersey. Charlie is brought on by the hospital to help Amy who is challenged immensely by her workload. A patient (Judith Delgado) dies a rather odd death while in the hospital which raises a red flag. There is not much to go on to declare that someone was definitely responsible but it’s a very good possibility.

Pretty soon, two detectives are on the case: Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (the superb Noah Emmerich of The Truman Show). An investigation is conducted. The past hospitals that Cullen worked at are called but the detectives cannot get any concrete information on the mysterious nurse who seems to have some potential skeletons in his closet. Eventually, the detectives are forbidden from coming by the hospital which further complicates an already intense situation.

When the movie sinks into the meat and potatoes of its plot, it plays a lot like one of those “Fill in the blank” from hell movies from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. We had the girlfriend from hell in Fatal Attraction, the cop from hell in Unlawful Entry and the tenant from hell in Pacific Heights. Here,, we get the nurse from hell but because the movie is based on a true story, there’s a lot more complexity than is found in your typical thriller. Redmayne expertly pours on the charm making the audience question if the man is actually capable of the things we find out he is accused of doing.

What happened was that Cullen was secretly using insulin to take out innocent patients who became his victims. Amy ends up going undercover to try to catch a confession from Cullen about the things that he has done in the past and to assess what he could be quite possibly capable of in the future. Cullen is, at one point, fired from the hospital for forging dates on his initial job application but the authorities warn Amy that this monster could get a job anywhere and that he must be stopped before more innocent lives are claimed.

While there isn’t much doubt as to Cullen’s guilt, Redmayne still offers audiences some of his strongest film work to date. Redmayne is absolutely terrifying as a man who has targeted innocent victims to carry out his demented plans for which there is seemingly not much of a reason for him to fulfill. The movie also points out how this man went from hospital to hospital without any of the places he worked at pursuing things against Cullen to the point that they could stop him from carrying out his evil tendencies elsewhere.

Cullen befriends Amy who is suffering enough as a single mom and has more on her plate than she’d like. Cullen becomes close to Amy’s daughters which gets Amy in way over her head. She must confront this psychopath in order to fulfill justice and, above all else, she must stop him from causing harm to others. This is very tense and disturbing material which is given above average treatment in filmmaker Lindholm’s thought-provoking movie.

There are scenes of The Good Nurse that are truly frightening. As Amy tries to dig up pieces of Cullen’s past, she calls an old friend at one point only to learn there is more truth in her assertions about his evil than she may have initially believed. It’s a real scary thought to be in the presence of evil and the movie plays this scenario out quite effectively.

Chastain adds another strong performance to her resume here. She is more down-to-earth than usual playing an everyday person who is just trying to survive her day-to-day endeavors. Her scenes opposite Redmayne are like watching two masters of the acting game. Redmayne gives a bit of a stronger performance in the showier role and has some truly horrific moments that help shed light on his instability. It’s hard to believe that this is a true story but it is!

The Good Nurse is a very good film. It has its flaws, though. It moves too fast and doesn’t develop some of its scenes properly. Amy seems to trust Cullen too quickly too. It could have used some more plot and character development in the earlier scenes to understand how Cullen got away with what he got away with. Still, this is a movie that will make viewers question how to properly trust the people we let into our personal lives and, even more importantly, it should make employers do intensive background checks before hiring health care professionals who we trust with our lives. This is a chilling movie that should be seen.

Rating: 7.5/10

Leave your thoughts on this The Good Nurse review and the film below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons. Readers seeking more film reviews can visit our Movie Review Page, our Movie Review Twitter Page, and our Movie Review Facebook Page. Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flipboard.