Where I Watched it: Netflix

English Audio Description Provided By: international Digital Center

Written by: Betty Capone

Narrated By: Liz gutman

Always a pleasure to see gutman as the narrator. most of the time she’s a writer, but here she delivers the audio description.

I gotta say, maybe it’s my expectations of what this could be, or that other projects like Dr Death have ruined this experience for me, but i wasn’t crazy about The Good nurse. I mean, by the end of the film, you’re told the gravitas of what this guy did, but I never actually felt the weight of it within the context of the film. The film itself is so quiet, like it’s making a conscious choice to subvert your expectations, but in doing so doesn’t quite do the story justice.

I know, it wants you to feel the realness of what is transpiring, like this could be you, and if it was, what would you do? the title plays with the “Good Nurse” either being Jessica Chastain’s actual good person who just happens to befriend a psychopath. She’s trying really hard to just make it to one year working, because she has a heart condition, but even though she herself is a nurse, she doesn’t have the money to pay for her own health insurance, and needs the one she’ll get after having worked a full year. It’s like working at Disney but not being able to go to the parks. Except, this has life and death consequences.

in steps in Eddie Redmayne’s not so good nurse, and she is showing him the ropes, he seems like a nice guy, so she opens up to him. In the beginning, the film is all about this relationship, which isn’t really based on sex, but more of a friendship between Redmayne and Chastain. He knows about her condition, and he sometimes helps out with the kids… when he’s not killing people.

The film largely forgoes one of those loud swelling scores that make moments more intense, and tries to keep this as subdued as possible. I didn’t really care for the balance. There’s something to be said for just letting things be, and sometimes that works. Here, it just deflates the movie, and by the time I’m supposed to hate Redmayne’s character for murdering like hundreds of people, I just wasn’t there. The film hadn’t earned it. I’m appalled by the situation as I would be by any story about this I would read in the news, but this never answered the question of why we needed a film adaptation.

Thank God though this wasn’t a limited series. With this pacing, it would have been a dirge. The thing about casting Chastain and Redmayne and resting the success of their film entirely on their performance, is that when you dial things back so much, the reality becomes that both Redmayne and Chastain have been better before. Both are Oscar winners, so to see them in this sleepy project didn’t do much for me, even though they very much carry the film.

It could ahve been so much better, but choices that I understand, just did not work for me. They might for you, but still, this will never be Chastain’s or Redmayne’s greatest performance, and this film won’t get any Oscar nominations this year.

Final Grade: C+