In last year's The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Jessica Chastain played a woman caught up in her televangelist husband's corruption, and won an Oscar for her performance. Now, she is taking on a different kind of true crime in The Good Nurse, playing the nurse who helped bring a real-life serial killer to justice.
Chastain stars as Amy Loughren, an overworked ICU nurse and single mother who strikes up a friendship with the hospital's newest nurse, Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne, himself an Oscar winner for 2015's The Danish Girl). But when patients suddenly begin dying on Charlie's watch, Amy uncovers the shocking truth about her new colleague— and the equally upsetting reason he keeps getting away with it.
Based on the book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber, the thriller was adapted by Oscar-nominee Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917) and helmed by Tobias Lindholm, the Danish director of 2016's Oscar-nominated A War and writer of the 2020 Best International Film winner, Another Round.
"Right now there's so many true crime things to watch, and you see it with cable news, this kind of desire to learn about something salacious or gossipy," Chastain said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "I wasn't really interested in that aspect of it. I was more interested in the cost of a human life and how the system failed everyone in this story. I wasn't interested in any kind of sensationalism, and neither is Tobias — there's a great dignity to the way he works and he can tell a story that's interesting, that makes us feel connected as a society, but also he does it in a way that makes us feel whole and healthy and there's no expense. I don't feel dirty after I've watched something of his."
The Good Nurse will premiere during the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and open in theaters Oct. 19 before streaming on Netflix on Oct. 26. Watch the trailer below.
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