The Good Nurse

Charles Cullen received 18 consecutive life sentences for murdering 29 patients, and the real number may be as high as 400. What the film is really about is not the killings but why they went on so long: hospitals that suspected him let him go without warning the next hospital. The system kept passing him along instead of stopping him. Tobias Lindholm adapted Charles Graeber's 2013 book. Jessica Chastain plays Amy Loughren, a nurse with an undiagnosed heart condition, no insurance and two children to keep upright. Eddie Redmayne never plays Cullen as a monster; he plays him as the helpful colleague who covers your shift, which is exactly what makes it unpleasant. It premiered at Toronto, arrived on Netflix in October 2022 and opened at number one with 68.31 million viewing hours in its first week. Who it is for: viewers interested in institutional liability and organised silence. Who it is not for: anyone expecting thriller pacing. It is deliberately cold and slow, and takes its horror from the record rather than from form.