Night Nurse Review

Night Nurse is the rare film that features exactly zero characters. Oh, there are plenty of people, to be sure. Most of them even have names! But that’s approximately where their definition stops. Each is a nurse at the same assisted living facility, the kind where the patients have complete freedom to roam and drive and use the phone, all with minimal supervision. The type of facility that is definitely a real thing. Whether the women ever leave the grounds is uncertain. It doesn’t seem so, as they hang around long past the end of their shift, and we’re focused on the newest member of the staff, Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), who lives on site. Georgia Bernstein’s screenplay highlights their emptiness, as multiple nurses are asked multiple times, “What do you do for fun?”, and every single time, the response is a bashful “I don’t know.”

Their immediate interests are clearer, although still murky. All have fallen under the spell of “dementia patient” Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), though none quite as intensely as Eleni. Douglas landed here after hitting on the housekeeper, whom he supposedly thought was his late wife. Meanwhile, a series of shots of his ever-searching eyes beg to differ, their eager light and the slight curl at the edge of his lips indicating the fun he’s having messing with the new nurse by deliberately failing a mental acuity test. No, he’s as lively as they come, despite being in his sixties or seventies. Even such, what could he possibly have that they want?

Money plays some role, as he spends his day scamming oblivious grandfathers with the help of Eleni (and maybe Mona (Eléonore Hendricks), before her abrupt departure). But it’s not clear the rest of the women know what’s going on. They spend large parts of their day draping themselves over his furniture and lap, as if he’s a pharaoh surrounded by his harem. Sure enough, he periodically beckons one of the ladies over to shove his tongue down her throat, or else just lick her face. Despite the sexual display, it seems no sex is occurring. While there’s caressing, groping, and (implied) digital penetration, the one time Eleni attempts to turn the tables, he pushes her away in disgust, admonishing her to go somewhere else is she’s simply looking for a “pogo stick”.

What exactly is she looking for? Neither she nor writer/director Bernstein seem to know. It’s established that Eleni has little past experience, and we don’t see anything to make us question that assertion. Her background is a complete mystery, save for the quickly dismissed rumor that she was fired from her last job, never to come up again. We don’t even know if she came to the facility specifically to explore a kink. The only certainty is that she almost instantly dials into its low-hum of sexual energy, starting in the nurse locker room, and unleashed when she submits to Douglas’ will (sexual and criminal) with almost no hesitation. From that moment on, she is obsessed with him, expressing her jealousy by constantly lurking around the corner, her face half obscured by the wall in repetitive shot that becomes funnier each time.

Accompanying this absolutely insane plot (that only builds steam as it plows forward) is troves of inane dialog. We’re treated to rote recitations of the lowest effort reactions to some occurrence, limp gestures at addressing some of the more egregious plot contrivances, and meaningless small talk between the nurses, every line delivered with a low-energy, flat affect. This combines with the copious shadows and dim lighting to craft an unceasingly dour tone, one whose oppressive air does not in any way match the plot. The clash ensures it becomes more audaciously funny than anything else, even once it finally slips into another gear in the last twenty minutes or so. There’s no chance you come to care about any of these characters, and the refusal to tell us anything about them makes questions pointless, so the sudden, unexpected escalation fails to evoke anything except befuddled astonishment.

Night Nurse‘s insistent lack of specificity results in a rudderless experience. Constructing characters no deeper than a puddle on a sunny day means the story must work overtime, and there’s just not much there. Such an alien experience without grounding in at least faintly recognizable humanity restricts its potential to mere curiosity. That said, the sheer boldness on display means you’d be hard pressed to have a bad time. Nonsensical but confident statements, bizarre behavior, miscalculated reactions, and a bunch of submissive women nonplussed by anything while focusing all their attention on an unsettlingly confident man more than twice their age is a recipe for memorable tableaus, that’s for sure. Given the framing of the ending, it would seem that is not what Bernstein was aiming for, but we can only react to what she put in front of us. And what she put in front of us is a confused yet hollow emulation of erotic thrillers of years past, leaving us feeling similarly confused and hollow.