When I was a kid, my parents did not pay for the premium cable channel packages: HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and The Movie Channel. I’m old enough that I predate Starz, so in case you’re wondering why I didn’t mention Starz, well, I’m older than you are. Those were the four movie channels you could pay extra for to get your big movies without commercials and without the profanity edited out of them. I used to get really excited whenever they had their free preview weekends or weeks. Sometimes, you might even get lucky and just barely be able to see one of those channels through the static without necessarily trying to do anything. I remember for a while I had a fuzzy version of Showtime, which allowed me to see a couple of films I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten to see. It looked like a really bad-quality VHS tape, but if you stayed up really late, then you got those movies your parents didn’t want you to see. You know the ones.

These were the movies that gave Cinemax the nickname Skinemax. Nearly soft-core films with thin plots and incredibly horny characters. Even if they didn’t have a lot of actual sex scenes or nudity, everything was heavily themed and suggestive, and everyone in the cast seemed like they really wanted to rush to bed as quickly as humanly possible. Some were even dark thrillers involving stalkers or serial killers, but they were never truly violent because they were there to tantalize more than scare. Night Nurse feels like a version of one of those movies, except toned down. It’s the kind of version that would’ve been edited for basic cable and somehow lost its ability to arouse in the process.

I actually kind of dug the plot for Night Nurse when I first heard about it. Written and directed by Georgia Bernstein, Night Nurse came to me as one of the many smaller films I get suggested to screen in the hopes of review coverage. I’m generally pretty good about doing this stuff, even when a movie doesn’t have audio description, because I know so many major critics only give the time of day to titles they think will bring them the biggest audience, especially on YouTube, where I also have a channel. It’s important for smaller movies like this to leave an imprint somewhere and for people to review them so we aren’t just drifting from Hollywood blockbuster to Hollywood blockbuster, based on some franchise that is also now on its fourth sequel. We need to celebrate original work, and I wanted to do that with Night Nurse. I answered the call to review and believe I made the mistake of doing my typical, “And it would be great if it had audio description,” to which I never got the screener. Even after a second round of, “Hey, by the way, I still didn’t receive the screener.” Well, now it’s sitting there on video on demand, and nothing can stop me. So let’s find out why nobody wanted me to see Night Nurse.

And I can kind of see it. I get it. First of all, the lack of audio description does put Night Nurse at a disadvantage because this isn’t a dialogue-heavy film. It’s thematically heavy, meaning the characters often seem to be in positions where they can telegraph what they’re thinking with a look. It’s almost like everyone here is a telepath and they just speak to each other through their minds. The dialogue that is used is sometimes weak and disconnected, delivered by actors who don’t always seem sure what they’re doing here. Clearly the film is structured as a psychosexual thriller of sorts, with a little bit of a catfishing mystery to it, but it’s so toned down and neutered. It should be far sexier than it is. It should be far more daring than it is. Dangerous, even. Even if we’re taking this purely at cinematic value and not comparing it to those pay-cable films I was talking about at the top, in the ’90s we had films like Basic Instinct and Sliver, and later things like Unfaithful. Why can’t Night Nurse at least match that tone, where sex always seemed to be on the table even in scenes where there wasn’t any, and in the few scenes where there was, the chemistry was undeniable?

Night Nurse centers on Eleni Sadik, played by Cemre Paksoy, a young nurse who becomes entangled with Douglas, played by Bruce McKenzie, at a senior living community. Douglas seems to have the place under his thumb, with nurses becoming involved in a scam where they call elderly men and pretend to be their long-lost granddaughters. These men clearly have some form of dementia or cognitive impairment but still have access to their money, and their fake granddaughters are suddenly in deep trouble and desperately need Grandpa to wire them some cash. At least for Eleni, these calls begin taking on a sexual nature. Both she and Douglas seem to take some form of arousal from the experience, and even later in the film when Douglas isn’t as excited about doing the calls anymore, she still is. It becomes some weird form of edging because we can’t ever truly get these characters anywhere. Instead, we get these bizarre phone calls where Eleni sounds about as emotionally invested in her supposed emergency as someone calling to ask what time the pharmacy closes. I don’t know whether Paksoy is a bad actress or was simply given poor direction, but every scam call sounded like it could’ve been made by an AI chatbot.

I think Night Nurse makes a huge mistake with Douglas and the choices it makes around his sexuality. I’m not really sure what the fear is in making a taboo erotic thriller with consequences, where this young nurse, new to the job, finds herself pulled in by an enigmatic older gentleman, falls into his wily ways and, as a byproduct of that attraction, gets involved in his schemes. Instead, it feels far broader than that. Everybody gets caught up in Douglas’s shenanigans, and Eleni is just the latest person to get caught in his tractor beam. Douglas does seem charismatic, and I’ll give McKenzie credit for that. The lines he delivers always have a sense of flirtation behind them, like this is a man who at one point in his life was quite the ladies’ man and has a ton of experience in this area. The problem is that the women he interacts with frequently sound like this is their first film and they’ve been given next to no direction in how to read the dialogue. That stunts the chemistry between these characters, leaving the entire film feeling somewhat flaccid.

Night Nurse is something I feel like, if the script had been passed to Adrian Lyne, the director of Unfaithful, Fatal Attraction and 9½ Weeks, he would’ve known exactly what to do with it. It would’ve had the right amount of tension, both built and relieved. Here, it feels like avoidance. Either stubbornly so because of some new-age belief that strong female leads rule and the male gaze is dead, or simply because the filmmakers were afraid the implications of the relationship dynamics would turn off an audience. But you’re an indie film. You’re not being released on 3,000 screens. If anything, you should want to be challenging. Film can be uncomfortable. It can be challenging. It can ask you to take an opinion different from one you might’ve held before and look at something from another perspective. Don’t back away from taboo subject matter because you’re afraid of how it will sell. Lean into it.

My favorite film of the year so far is still Blue Film because it had so much audacity. I appreciated the massive swing it took at a time when everything seems like a remake, reboot, sequel or something adjacent. Night Nurse also follows another seemingly heavily influenced film from this summer, Maddie’s Secret, which seemed to take inspiration from Lifetime movies of the ’80s and ’90s with its melodramatic approach to eating disorders. It was clear there that John Early was both paying homage to something and knew how to do it. Here, Night Nurse feels like it wants to pay homage, but has no idea what that means or how to pull it off. You can’t just invoke the erotic thriller and expect the atmosphere to materialize around you. You have to commit to it.

Night Nurse is a film that possibly, with audio description, could’ve snuck across the line into Fresh, but at the same time, the audio description would have to convince me that the rest of the cast aside from Bruce McKenzie were actually giving good performances, which is a hard sell. It would also somehow have to convince me that the film is far sexier than it actually is. Since I’ve read reviews from other critics who also noted how tame the film feels, I have a feeling it would still come across as the Nerf equivalent of a Showtime midnight movie. There might be more visually happening here that I’m missing without audio description, and I’m willing to acknowledge that accessibility gap, but there are fundamental problems with the dialogue, performances, chemistry and tone that description can’t magically fix.

I didn’t come into Night Nurse intending to throw it down simply because I didn’t get a screener, with or without audio description, and later had to find the film myself. I bring that up because there is a certain audacity in ignoring me after an accessibility request, and I should be able to discuss that. When I’m presented with these opportunities, I still go Fresh enough times that it blows my mind when people seem to make decisions for me about what I will or won’t like based on my need for audio description or accessibility, as if I can’t determine or disseminate that on my own. I wanted Night Nurse to work. I wanted to champion the weird little erotic thriller that wasn’t part of a cinematic universe and wasn’t trying to sell me another legacy sequel. The plot summary I was originally given sounded far more interesting than the film I eventually got.

Night Nurse just didn’t make the cut for me. There’s a potentially dangerous, uncomfortable and genuinely sexy thriller buried somewhere inside Georgia Bernstein’s concept, and Bruce McKenzie occasionally seems like the only person who realizes what kind of movie he’s supposed to be in. Unfortunately, the film surrounding him keeps backing away from the very things that could’ve given it a pulse. If a film ever needed Viagra, it’s Night Nurse.

Rotten: 4.8/10