121 min | R | October 19, 2022 | Netflix
Eddie Redmayne plays a nurse who murders his patients with quiet precision. Jessica Chastain plays the colleague who helps catch him. The horror here is institutional, and the system that protected him is the real killer.
Amy Loughren is a critical care nurse with a failing heart and two kids to raise. She works exhausting night shifts at a New Jersey hospital while hiding a cardiomyopathy that could kill her before her insurance kicks in. Charles Cullen is the new hire who picks up her slack, covers her secret, and becomes her friend. He is also poisoning patients with insulin and digoxin. The film is not really a whodunit. It is a study of how hospitals pass a killer down the line to avoid liability, and how a workplace full of decent people fails to stop a man hiding in plain sight.
Jessica Chastain plays Amy as a woman running on empty. She makes the exhaustion physical. Her hands shake, her breath catches, and she keeps working anyway because she has no choice. Eddie Redmayne plays Cullen with a flat, recessive stillness that refuses the usual serial-killer theatrics. He speaks softly, listens too well, and weaponizes ordinary kindness. The friendship between the two reads as genuine, which is what makes Amy’s slow realization land with such weight. Redmayne saves his only outburst for a single late scene, and the restraint everywhere else makes it detonate.
Tobias Lindholm directs from a script by Krysty Wilson-Cairns with deliberate coolness. The hospital is lit in sickly fluorescent greens and underwater blues, and the camera holds at a clinical remove that mirrors the institution’s own detachment. Lindholm shoots the murders without showing them. He lingers instead on empty corridors, on monitors, on the bureaucratic meetings where administrators talk around the deaths. The procedural detective work between Amy and the two investigators, played by Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich, builds tension through paperwork and access requests rather than chases. Kim Dickens plays the hospital’s risk manager as a study in corporate self-protection.
The film’s argument is sharper than its temperature. Cullen moves through nine hospitals over sixteen years because each one quietly lets him resign rather than report him. The institutions choose their own legal exposure over the lives of their patients every single time. Lindholm’s muted approach drains some of the dread the material could generate, and the cool surface occasionally holds the audience at arm’s length. What remains is a clear-eyed indictment of a system that turns competence and friendliness into camouflage, anchored by two performers who trust silence more than spectacle.