In the opening shot of "The Good Nurse," a slow, steady, unilluminating drip of a medical mystery, a serial killer in scrubs named Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) watches his victim die. The patient has gone into convulsions, and Charles, the nurse who sounded the alarm, stands back as the doctors swoop in and try in vain to save the day. In a perhaps inadvertently telling gesture, the camera eases the suffering, flatlining patient out of the frame and creeps slowly toward Charles, whose inscrutable expression is meant to chill you to the bone. It's as if the murderous satisfaction he feels — and the anxious concern he's trying to project — have somehow canceled each other out, leaving only a curious, malevolent blankness.
Redmayne, an actor who tends to call attention to his own subtlety, works hard to make that blankness sinister. (The ominously pulsing score composed by Biosphere tries even harder.) It isn't sinister, though; it's tiresomely obvious. Even as the doctors respond to a code blue, the movie throws up its own "Uh-oh, maniac alert!" signal to the audience, establishing Charles as a teasing enigma that will presumably be unraveled by story's end. Why did the real-life Cullen spend his 16-year nursing career murdering patient after patient, injecting their IV bags with lethal doses of insulin, digoxin and other medications? (He confessed to killing 40 people between 1988 and 2003; it's estimated that the real number may have been as high as 400.)
A quick scroll through Cullen's Wikipedia page turns up some potential clues: childhood bullying, multiple suicide attempts, his parents' untimely deaths. None of these details — or an early stint in the U.S. Navy, where he was further harassed and bullied — appear in Krysty Wilson-Cairns' screenplay, which she adapted from Charles Graeber's 2013 book, "The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder." For a while, that omission feels like the right decision, born of a principled refusal to sentimentalize a killer or ascribe his actions to a tidy, convenient set of motives. Instead, the director, Tobias Lindholm, keeps Charles at a distance, easing him in and out of the story at key moments and drawing continual attention to his practiced bedside manner and warm, solicitous smile.
