Night Nurse

by Mike McGranaghan

Once in a blue moon, a movie comes along where I genuinely can’t grasp how I’m intended to be entertained by it. Night Nurse is one of those movies. This isn’t the worst film of the year, but it might be my least favorite because of its steadfast refusal to create any sort of internal logic. It’s not nearly scary enough to be a horror movie, nor steamy enough to be an erotic thriller. The drama level is low, and despite an intermittent tongue-in-cheek feeling, there are no laughs to render it a comedy. It’s just sort of…there.

Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) is the newest nurse at a retirement community. There’s an inference that the character has got a troubled past, but the story doesn’t go into specifics. She’s assigned to work with an older gentleman, Douglas (Bruce McKenzie). Not long after they meet, he coerces her into participating in a phone scam aimed at other seniors. Eleni doesn’t like this deceit at first. She grows into it over time, though, as there seems to be an erotic element to participating. Sexual chemistry also arises with another nurse, Mona (Eleonore Hendricks), who is similarly part of Douglas’s scheme.

Written and directed by Georgia Bernstein, Night Nurse suffers from a refusal to justify anything that happens in its story. Douglas visibly has a lot of power over the young female nurses. We’re given no indication of where that power comes from. On a similar note, it’s hazy why the nurses are so willing to jeopardize their careers for this guy by going along with his scams. Or why they willingly allow Douglas to drug them. Bernstein is presumably seeking to explore the idea of cult-like influence. To do that successfully, she would have needed to make it far more clear what sway he has over them.

Consequently, the film goes around in a loop, repeating the exact same beats again and again. They pull the scam, Eleni gets aroused, the retirement community manager (Mimi Rogers) tries to figure out who’s pulling the scam, Douglas pretends to be too senile to be culpable, etc. (Incidentally, you get tired of hearing the phone scam’s dialogue so many times.) An effort to introduce more obvious suspense arrives in the final five minutes. Too little, too late.

In fairness, Bernstein is quite good at setting an off-kilter mood. There’s an ominous vibe that hangs over the picture, especially during scenes where the nurses take their charges for exercise in the swimming pool. That skill could be put to effective use with a plot that has extra structure. Hopefully, she will have the opportunity to do that at some point.

Beyond its tone, Night Nurse is merely frustrating. It perpetually seems on the cusp of being about something, only to retread the same ground, never getting anywhere in the process.