No, The Good Nurse is not the latest CBS procedural. It’s wildly the opposite of that: a lifetime movie masquerading as a prestige drama. Netlifx, never one to shy away from true crime, is a perfect home for this horrifying real life tale that is going to scare a lot of people, including what I assume will be nurses themselves who will be accused of serial killing when something goes wrong.
The audience has two choices to decide who The Good Nurse is. Option 1 is Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain). A single mother with a heart condition, Amy works long hours while trying to manage her symptoms for 4 months until she can get the surgery she needs. Coming to her aid is new nurse hire Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), option 2. Charlie sees Amy struggling, and offers to keep her secrets and babysit her kids from time to time. Not making things easier though is a sudden spike in patients dying, from strange symptoms that don’t exactly seem, um, naturally occurring.
Lifetime movie! Prestige drama!! 2 Oscar Winners!!! And yet, The Good Nurse should probably have been none of those things, and been a police procedural following Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) and Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha). The deaths these two are investigating uncover giant institutional shortcomings of the healthcare industry. Similar to The Hunting Ground, Tim and Danny find little to no help from the hospital’s risk manager (a woefully underused Kim Dickens), who are more interested in protecting the credibility and financial viability of their company than actually investigating a crime. Plus, with that money, the hospital’s bureaucratic power inhibits the relatively powerless local police from doing any real unbiased investigation. Frustration mounts for the two well meaning cops, to the point that they consider multiple times circumventing the laws they swear to uphold in order to find some sort of justice for what is clearly a serial killer enabled by the hospital system.
But Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain agreed to be in The Good Nurse, abruptly ending the focus on the police investigation. That shift to Amy/Charlie, even though a serial killer is involved, lacks the meat of the police investigation: its a very simple cat and mouse game. The script becomes an escalating exercise in Lifetime Original plotting, with characters making dumb decisions to keep the story moving and raise the stakes. As is, The Good Nurse would have been a throwaway Netflix release…except 2 Oscar winners are playing the leads. When tension needs to be high, Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne really flex their acting muscles and make the movie palpably scary. Particularly Redmayne, who’s completely content flirting with unintentional comedy a LOT of the time here, as if he realized halfway through he might as well go for broke. As a result, The Good Nurse is a hot mess, finding moments of brilliance surrounded by some moments so bad/crazy you laugh even though you’re NOT supposed to.
Sounds like a perfect Netflix and Chill right? Even though Netflix goes for prestige, they’re perfectly content living above Lifetime Originals but below Focus Features. And they couldn’t have found a better collaborator than Redmayne, who will either do something great or something hilariously terrible every time the director let’s him loose.