Director: Georgia Bernstein
Writer: Georgia Bernstein
Stars: Cemre Paksoy, Bruce McKenzie, Eleonore Hendricks
Synopsis: As a series of perverse scam calls unsettles an idyllic retirement community, a starry-eyed nurse becomes entangled with her mysterious patient.
Night Nurse opens with one of the stranger sequences you’re likely to see in a film this year. You hear a young woman seemingly on the phone with her grandfather. At first, she’s describing being in an accident, needing his help. As the camera slowly moves around her body, the conversation turns much more seductive. It’s quickly revealed she’s in no trouble at all, and this is either some role-playing game or she’s trying to scam someone. It sets the stage for what should seemingly be a pretty steamy erotic thriller. If only the rest of the film could deliver on that potential.
We are quickly introduced to Nurse Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) and Douglas (Bruce McKenzie) as they get paired up for Eleni to care for Douglas as his new nurse. Douglas lives in a retirement community, and they’ve had a lot of trouble finding a good fit for his care. He’s believed to have early-onset Alzheimer’s and is frequently unsure of where he is or who he’s with. Once Eleni and Douglas are alone together, he ropes her into a call like the one we see at the beginning of the film. They not only get a chunk of change out of this call, but their relationship turns from professional to sensual in a hurry.
Thus begins a string of events leading many nurses to fall under Douglas’s spell. He has an oddball sort of charm and piercing, magnetic blue eyes that draw these young women in, which is honestly confounding. He maintains a power over them that causes them to not be able to leave his side, but I left the movie not really understanding what they were gaining from this arrangement.
Writer-director Georgia Bernstein brought this film to Sundance as part of the NEXT section, certainly a category for boundary-pushing and otherwise odd films, and it’s clear how Night Nurse ended up here. Its psychosexual nature subverts your expectations of a sexier, showier erotic thriller. It’s frankly a lot less thrilling and erotic than I could have ever imagined. The film finds ways to make you very uncomfortable without feeling titillated at the same time, creating a one-of-a-kind feeling that sticks with you after the credits roll.
Paksoy is the only one who gets much to work with on the acting front, and she does a solid job in her role. Her performance displays the constant war within herself, caught between resisting Douglas’ invigorating schemes and fully giving in to them. While she initially succumbs, she’s the only one to falter in her devotion to Douglas as the other nurses become more captive to him, delivering a more nuanced performance as the story progresses.
Technically speaking, the film is incredibly well made. Bernstein clearly has a vision and an ability to execute on that vision with how the movie feels, sounds, and looks. I was especially impressed by the color grading and overall cinematography. For a film with a fairly stationary setting, great care was put into making the few locations look as good as possible, with saturation that brings out deep greens and blues and highlights Douglas’ dimly lit home to perfection. An eerie piano-driven score enhances the discomfort that comes from watching these girls completely unable to snap out of their trance.
Despite the vibe that Bernstein and crew create, the film is missing a final push into eroticism and thrills to get across the finish line. Night Nurse feels like a slog for much of its 95-minute run time, meandering and wandering with no real end goal in sight. The eventual third-act action that somewhat gets things moving isn’t quite explosive enough to pay off the slow burn of the first 70 or so minutes.
Night Nurse is a well-made, good-looking film that suffers from a lack of narrative momentum in its last half and not quite enough eroticism or thrills to constitute it as falling under the erotic thriller genre. Paksoy offers up a strong performance that’s worthy of seeing, and the subtle technical achievements are nothing to scoff at either. Bernstein has certainly made a name for herself as someone with a strong eye for filmmaking, and I hope she gets another crack at making a feature very soon.
