Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne star in grim true-crime drama The Good Nurse — film review

No slight on the actors, but most suspensions of disbelief would struggle with the casting of Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne as overworked staff in a New Jersey hospital, baggy-eyed from the night shift. In true-crime drama The Good Nurse, it obliges director Tobias Lindholm to dial down the star power. Some of the job falls to the locations: the stairwells of police stations, strip-lit hospital break rooms. But the blue-grey mood also flows from the story. The subject is the serial murder of patients in critical care, based on the grim 2003 case of Charles Cullen, recounted here with unflashy sobriety.

Chastain is Amy Loughren, the kind of nurse who knows the names of her patients and goes the extra mile for their welfare. Arriving at a new ICU amid staffing shortages, Redmayne’s Cullen is pale and rabbitty, but comes with a wealth of references and matter-of-fact compassion. The pair are soon friends: parents of young kids, born carers. And if “Charlie” always seems to be on duty when a patient flatlines, well, he is as sorrowful as anyone.

The movie doesn’t insult our intelligence or cheapen the gravity by dragging out the question of his guilt. But that leaves dramatic space to fill. Lindholm also needs to manage the risk of depicting a killer who — a spoiler warning here — never explains his inhumanity. No lesson in pathology is forthcoming. Thin as that rationale can be for true crime, without it the danger is blank titillation — as seen in Monster, the recent Netflix series about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

The engine for the drama becomes the horrified realisation of Chastain’s Loughren. The saving grace for the film is spotlighting the structure that gave Cullen licence: a medical system in which a string of US hospitals quietly let him move on to the next payroll every time suspicions about him came to light. First do no harm to the corporate reputation. The rest is someone else’s problem.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas now and on Netflix from October 28