Review of The Good Nurse, directed by Tobias Lindholm

I remember when this movie first dropped on Netflix, I didn’t really have an interest in watching it. I had never heard of the case it was based on, and I don’t really like content about nurses (except for the Korean drama Daily Dose of Sunshine—that was such a brilliant drama depicting how it can get to your mental health).

So you’re probably wondering what the heck got me to watch this movie. Well, something to think about is during the Spring of 2024 I had a lot of time where I was just forced to write my master’s thesis, which means I needed to unwind in some ways or I’d actually go insane.

During this time, I watched a lot of movies that I would say are outside of my comfort zone. If you look at all of my blog posts in the past few months, a good chunk are coming from this time, and they’re kind of outside my usual kind of movie I’d pick up for entertainment.

That was how I ended up watching The Good Nurse in a nutshell! I’m already starting to ramble, so let’s get into the review.

A nurse struggling with health conditions discovers one of her colleague’s messy secrets.

This story takes place in 2003, somewhere in New Jersey. Our protagonist is Amy Loughren, who works as an ICU nurse at a Jersey hospital in order to support herself and her family, as she is a single mother. But we learn early on something major about Amy: she has cardiomyopathy, which means that she has heart problems.

She can lose her job at any moment because of it, but she has to stay for a few more months to keep her health insurance and get a heart transplant. So she continues working the night shifts, and a new nurse, Charles Cullen, is brought on to work with her during the evenings.

The two of them become friends quickly, and Charlie agrees to keep her secret when he finds out about it. However, a new storm is brewing when an elderly patient of theirs dies suddenly, and the hospital board sweeps the woman’s death under the table.

Local police detectives are weary of this, though, as the hospital didn’t even report the death until seven weeks after the body had already been cremated. Detective Baldwin has a suspicion about Charlie, as apparently had charges several years prior.

They end up going to Amy, who realizes that the patient had been given insulin despite not being a diabetic. She does defend Charlie, though, and the detectives go away for now. Instead, they go to the other hospitals Charlie worked at, and discover none of them are willing to talk to the police.

The detectives are banned from the hospital after they keep prying, but when another patient dies after accidentally being given insulin, Amy is now suspicious. She learns of where Charlie was at previously and reaches out to a friend there, and she realizes there were several random insulin related deaths while he was there.

Amy goes into the hospital’s storage and discovers punctures in the IV bags, but collapses after finding that out. When she wakes up in the ER, she informs the detectives immediately, and they exhume the body of a deceased patient. Upon the autopsy, they learn insulin and digoxin killed her.

Charlie is fired from his job, and Amy meets with him in order to subtly question him. He acts aggressively, and the police end up arresting him. He does not confess on the record, and when Amy goes to talk to him, he finally confesses.

He was given 18 life sentences later on for his crimes, and his true number of victims is unknown. Amy got her heart surgery, then moved to Florida with her daughters and their kids.

Overall Thoughts

While this movie did introduce me to a major case that I had no idea about in the past, which really happened, I don’t know if it really made for a compelling movie in my mind. If someone else loved it, great for them! I’m happy they enjoyed it.

Like I said before, I’m not really interested in nursing. I think centralizing the perspective on Amy adds a dramatized touch that I didn’t care for in the narrative—it should either be just her or Charlie’s perspective. We do land on just her in this structure, but it didn’t go deep enough on why he did what he did to me.

And we may never know in reality. Regardless, I was more interested in this as a study of people’s grey areas of morality, and how they can seem nice but kill a lot of people.

Go watch this one if you’re interested!

Follow me below on Instagram and Goodreads for more.