When nursing goes wrong. Terribly wrong.
BQB here with what may be Netflix’s first Oscar contender of the year.
Based on a true story, this movie tells the story of Nurse Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) a nurse with a heart who always calls her patients by first name and goes out of her way to help them.
Alas, she’s in need of help herself. Speaking of hearts, she has a condition with hers that requires a heart transplant. She shouldn’t even be working. She should be at home resting and seeking treatment but she needs to be on the job four more months until her health insurance kicks in.
Thus, when Nurse Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) starts working at her hospital, he’s like a godsend. Charlie helps Amy carry her workload, and even pitches in helping her raise her two daughters as a single mom. He asks for nothing in return, even the relationship itself seems platonic as he doesn’t seek any nookie or anything.
When detectives start poking around the suspicious death of one of Charlie’s patients, they unravel threads that lead to a more sinister tale. Charlie has a habit of being passed around like a bad penny from hospital to hospital. The hospital administrators always suspect foul play, but can never prove it, so they fire him on some pretense (paperwork violation, for example) send him on his way and then Charlie becomes the next hospital’s problem.
In short, Charlie is subtly killing his patients. Putting drugs in their IVs that induce death, but because many of these patients are in a bad state already, their deaths end up looking natural. One of these hospitals could have taken the lawsuit and put Charlie in jail early but instead they just choose to cover up. The problem is the hospitals don’t communicate and Charlie just takes his show down the road.
When the detectives seek Amy’s help in getting the goods on Charlie, she can hardly believe her BFF has a dark side, but she does the right thing at great personal cost, putting her health and job on the line.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Charlie is the first villain, though it is confounding as we are never given a reason as to why he murders other than maybe he is mad about his ex wife so takes it out on his patients. Eddie Redmayne excels in this part as a seemingly, at least on the surface, average Joe. He isn’t playing a historic figure or alien or wizard as he often does. Chastain is typical Chastain. She may be the healthiest looking heart transplant patient around, and sometimes they have her huff and puff and keel over to remind you amidst all the running around she is doing that she is sick.
The second villain is the hospital system. Cover, deflect and deny at all costs rather than take a financial hit but in so doing, take a killer nurse out of the system. Cullen was convicted of 28 counts of murder but there are suspicions he may have killed up to 400. He could have been stopped earlier.
Bookshelf Battle 