In the film “The Good Nurse,” an all-star cast of directors featuring Jessica Chastain and Eddy Redmayne tells the true story of a male nurse who overdosed on patients with drugs in American hospitals, killing up to hundreds of them.
The protagonist of “The Good Nurse,” which is based on the same-named book, is ICU nurse Amy Loughren, who assisted in the investigation of Charles Cullen’s murders in 2003.
Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain portrays Loughren, a cardiomyopathy patient who works long night shifts in a New Jersey hospital to meet the requirements for health insurance. Loughren is a single mother.
She is relieved when the ostensibly highly qualified Cullen, played by fellow Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne, is hired to work with her because she is struggling with the workload. The two rapidly become close, and Cullen assists Loughren in caring for her two young girls while also masking her condition.
Detectives start to have doubts about Cullen after two patients in the ICU pass very suddenly. They also question his prior employment in other institutions. They require Loughren’s assistance to capture him.
At the film’s premiere at the London Film Festival, Chastain said to media sources, “It was very stressful because I’m playing a real person. I need to honour what she did, her heroic acts but then I also need to make sure it’s not sensationalised and fetishised for consumption. And so it felt like a big responsibility.”
Tobias Lindholm, who wrote the Oscar-winning Danish film “Another Round,” makes his feature film directing debut in English with “The Good Nurse.”
Cullen received 11 life sentences after confessing to killing up to 40 people. Investigators think he may have killed up to 400 patients in total.
Redmayne, who played Cullen, remarked, “Meeting the real Amy Loughren, who talked about how this person was a close friend of hers, someone she loved, someone she found funny and empathetic, and that she only ever met this murderer, this killer, twice and it was a different human being. That was a kind of insight.”
Loughren, who took a one-and-a-half-year retirement, went to London for the film’s debut.
She noted, “It’s such a hard subject matter that I really struggled with being OK with being excited. And I didn’t want to sensationalise a serial killer.”
“I’m so proud of what Tobias did with this story, that I can celebrate his art. I can celebrate Eddie working so hard at his craft. I can celebrate who Jessica is and that she played the me from 20 years ago. It’s wonderful. I’m honoured.”
“On October 26, Netflix will begin broadcasting “The Good Nurse.”
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